Main Online Casino KPIs to Analyze and Improve
Launching an online casino is an attractive option in a rapidly growing gambling industry. Many people believe there’s a great opportunity to make online casino profits. It’s not as simple as it seems. Gaming KPIs are essential business tools, and casino performance metrics can streamline operations. The first technical element requires setting up and building an online casino platform with casino KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They will help you plan your strategy and ensure you have a better overview of all factors that can affect your operations. The second element for casinos is marketing the platform to acquire and retain players through key performance indicators, gaming KPIs, and relevant metrics. They will point you in the right direction and show you what works and what doesn’t. Analyzing such metrics is crucial to avoid pitfalls and avoid unprofitable marketing costs. You’ll be able to invest in more profitable areas of marketing. That will help you become one of the best online gambling sites.
The next stage is when a casino has been created, and it’s time to consider marketing. To generate customers, you must market your online casino, and to retain them, you must market your services to players. Online casinos employ diverse marketing methods and strategies. The goal of casino KPIs always remains to get as many players as possible and keep them playing games for as long as possible. It’s hard to convince casinos to invest considerable money in marketing to win and keep their players online. You know what you pay for, which becomes the KPIs. KPIs are how businesses and casinos measure their health. Like any other business, with the best online gambling practices, there is no magic formula for running a casino online, not even with gaming KPIs.
The metrics are KPIs, but they do not guarantee success for casinos. They must be carefully monitored over time, your business model must be adjusted, and the effects of your changes must be charted.
Tracking gaming KPIs for casinos such as NGR, GGR, Average Revenue Per User, Bets-to-Deposits, NGR-to-Deposits, Churn Rate and Lifetime Value will give you metrics to measure the progress of your online casino and help you with key performance indicators to help you plan your game.
Introduction to KPIs in Online Casinos
When we talk of performance and profit, the yardsticks to be considered are quite a number. The KPIs of online casino business are these benchmarks for the best online gambling, and they will help you notice what you should tackle and what areas you have done the best. The best criterion for measuring various factors that balance and adjust your business is acquiring specific, detailed player data. The more information you have on your players’ behavior, including their game preferences, the easier it is to combat their issues and create a unique game experience to increase your retention rate and loyalty. Then, KPIs become the most valuable components for measuring results and capturing actionable insights.
In other words, key performance indicators are the measurable metrics used to measure your company’s pulse. No unique method or equation will teach operators how their business is run and managed. It depends on your experience, intuition, and knowledge of gaming KPIs and the gaming industry. The final results are revealed only when your campaign closes to the wire. Gaming KPIs measure the performance of your online casino business for a diagnostic purpose. They don’t tell you how to improve these shortcomings, but there are plenty of opportunities in tracking and analyzing KPIs. For instance, you can see how you have improved and adjusted your business model after charting the outcomes.
Various KPIs are used to assess the performance and profitability of online casinos, including NGR-to-Deposits, Bets-to-Deposits, CGR, NGR, conversion rates, retention rates, churn rate, and lifetime value. They can split into key financial, user-related, and hybrid KPIs.
You’ll learn about frequently used and practical metrics to help you evaluate your online casino and its key performance indicators.
Key Financial KPIs
Financial-related indicators clearly and transparently show the online casino profit margin. The bottom-line KPIs are money-related and include financial key performance indicators. Those metrics can help you examine your annual or monthly reports, budgets, and income.
Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR)
Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) is just a math concept—how much players bet minus the amount they win, which is not difficult to grasp. Despite this, GGR does not include payouts like bonuses. This financial indicator calculates the amount of bets minus the total sum of the winnings. It displays the total revenue when excluding players' expenses at the casino.
Formula:

Here’s an example of how it works. Imagine a fictitious gambling company called Grand Gaming. Players wager $1.5 million a year, and winners pocket $900,000 from bets wagered and gambled. You can calculate the GGR by subtracting the total winnings from the total gambled on the site.

That’s not the profit, of course. It’s merely the gross revenue that Grand Gaming generated through betting. You'll get the net profit after subtracting the expenses from the GGR.
Calculate the GGR by subtracting the total winnings from the total gambled on the site.
GGR is a pure measurement of the game results. The amount the casino won over, or how much players lost over a certain period. GGR could decline for many reasons, and those causes for a decline in GGR do not always impact the profits of your casino. Two good starting points are encouraging the existing players to spend more and bringing in more players when you have the budget.
Promotions — sums such as jackpots, free spins, bonuses, tournaments, etc. — can be used to entice new players to register and players who already have an account to sign up, make further deposits, and play. Always use clear conditions to ensure that bonuses are not abused.
Net Gaming Revenue (NGR)
The NGR indicator represents actual casino earnings, which have been deducted from the casino expenses. These expenses involve bonuses, payment systems, affiliate partner commissions, game software developer net royalty fees, recurring online gaming license fees, etc. NGR is what you should use to determine a brand’s success.

Now, let’s use the same example as above: Grand Gaming. To calculate NGR, we start with the GGR of $1,500,000 and subtract player winnings of $900,000. Then, we deduct operational expenses, which include:
- Player Bonuses $160,000
- Taxation $80,000
- Recurring License Fees $40,000
- Affiliate Commissions $20,000
- Royalty Fees $10,000
- Payment System Chargebacks $5,000
- Total expenses $315,000
Final NGR = $1,500,000 - $900,000 - $315,000 = $285,000.
NGR is one of the most used words in the online gambling industry and gives a general idea about the performance of an online gambling project. NGR presents a quick, neat sum-up of an online casino performance. GGR, although a good indicator of trends is, however, more shallow in terms of the main costs included in the figure.
GGR and NGR are commonly used KPIs at the business and company levels. GGR has been used as a national, regional, and global by-product.
NGR-to-Deposits & Bets-to-Deposits
What percentage of the money do the players put into the machine when they gamble? Putting money on the line is the purpose of the player part. Deposits themselves don’t do much for your balance sheet.
NGR-to-deposits is the percentage of player deposits at the casino that become revenue. In reality, a good percentage of turnover will culminate in NGR, so players must bet as much as possible. It enables you to determine which players are wagering and how much of what is deposited.
The combination of NGR into deposits and bets into deposits are metrics that can help you see what incentives you offer your players to complete and bet after initiating sign-up. The idea is either an e-commerce site trying to decide what causes customers to put things into their cart and never complete their purchase.
Another problem might be that your game is not offering enough. The article claims that if players make deposits to their accounts but do not place bets, this may be a problem. Your portfolio may have few or no new or engaging titles for players to play.
User-Related KPIs
User-related KPIs concern players and include interactions, activity, and satisfaction. Analyzing such metrics allows you to develop strategies to encourage player experiences and promote loyalty. Such metrics may indicate when clients stop following your platform, how active the metrics are, and other relevant information. These indicators are connected to your past, present, and future players. Key performance indicators can assist you with the quality of operations to bring in more clients and keep them current.
The metrics one can use to categorize the people-related KPIs include the following.
Conversion Rate
The conversion percentage rate is for users who acted as you want, compared to those who could have performed the same action. A great example is the banner-shaped link leading to your site, which can lead to clicks on your site (or not).
Conversion rate is a metric that indicates a link in the customer journey’s chain. It can reveal the part of the marketing funnel from which the customers jump. Therefore, keeping this number in mind, you will be able to complete the map of the customer journey and find what leads can do to strengthen the weak parts of the funnel. The indicators are visitors/viewers, registered/viewers, and depositors/registered. If the conversion rate tends to be low, there are issues that the casino can correct.
Visitors to signups conversion rate: How many of your site’s new players sign up as new users? This customer journey stage can be the conversion rate that lets you know whether visitors will sign up because your bonuses and promotions are not enticing enough.
Customer retention from signups: How many players sign up and have an account to go onto deposit? A signup bonus may be warranted if signups aren’t making deposits.
Churn Rate & Retention
Once you convert users into depositing players, how long will they stay on the site?
The Retention Rate measures the percentage of players who continue to engage with the site over a given period. It is calculated by dividing the number of returning players by the total number of players at the start of that period and then multiplying by 100. It's a key indicator that helps you understand how loyal your customers are and how long they will likely be profitable. A low retention rate might mean you'd better improve your loyalty scheme or hit those personalized promo messages. Monitoring retention rates helps you increase players' lifetime value and optimize how much you should spend on marketing.
The Сhurn Rate represents the percentage of players who stop using the platform within a given timeframe. . It will be analyzed, and it will have some profound implications. Tracking your players’ time on your platform helps create or improve your retention strategies and may indicate that you’re at risk of bonus abuse, such as signups that churn after pressing their rollovers.
There is no fix; a drop in retention signifies something out of whack. A high churn rate would indicate player dissatisfaction, competition, even better performance from rivals, a lack of game offerings, or other deficiencies.
Online casinos usually have detailed statistics about their players’ associations with the site. Using this analysis, one can decrease the churn rate and increase revenue potential.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
This metric is the total profit earned from a player during his overall stay in the casino. Casino operators do all they can to increase this metric.
A Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total revenue a player has generated on the platform while staying on.
Formula:

However, comparing Customer Lifetime Value by player segment can indicate which data points will generate good value for your casino. Knowing and predicting historical CLV could be used to plan retention strategies and future CLV.
In other words, you’d want to track, analyze, and summarize player behavior data, set up growth strategies, and develop new solutions. The KPIs mentioned above in online casinos are the lenses through which an operator needs to see the business’s performance.
Hybrid KPIs
The online casino KPIs relate to both user behavior and financial implications. The list of indicators involves Cost per Acquisition and Average Revenue per User.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
The cost per acquisition is a player's money to sign up and deposit.
The CPA indicator reflects approximately how much was invested into a user so that he could sign up and deposit on the platform. It illustrates the typical marketing budget necessary for player acquisition and the effectiveness of promotional marketing and advertisement.
The Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is the average cost to acquire one new user. The only way to know that your marketing efforts are worth the time and money is to track performance and analyze CPA, the average amount required to bring in a new first-time depositor.
Online casinos receive traffic in several ways. SEO, or search engine optimization, usually generates new traffic. However, online casinos can also raise their profile through paid ads and link buying.
Affiliate networks are where affiliate partners, such as bloggers and streamers, redirect their traffic toward online casinos. These networks are widely used throughout the gaming industry.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
There is also Average Revenue per User (ARPU). This illustrates the quantity of money that an average player generates each month in the casino. To calculate the ARPU, you can divide all net gaming revenue for casinos by players per month.
The ARPU indicates how much casinos earn from an average player over a period, such as a month, a quarter, or a year. This indicator is obtained by dividing the total net gaming revenue of casinos for a certain period by the number of active players in the same period.
Revenue Per User (RPU) is the equivalent of the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). It indicates the amount of money generated or lost for one player at a particular time. If a casino’s net gaming revenue for a certain period — generally a month or a year — divided by the number of active players during the same period gives you a result that is ARPU.
Conclusion
Although the online business for casinos began a few decades ago, it cannot be overlooked that it has been developing and growing. Due to the convenience and value it brings players worldwide, it is expected to continue growing very fast. This is a good opportunity to enter this burgeoning area and establish an online platform with casinos of value.
As an operator of casinos, you need a beneficial mind to earn your share in the continually swelling gambling field. Consider and use effective customer relationship management and key performance indicators as tools you should use on your platform. This will give you a much-needed edge in the gambling industry.
Casinos are becoming popular, so many want to start one for business or leisure. However, starting a casino requires a lot of hard work and someone who will spend time and effort managing the business effectively. Effective management is crucial for making well-informed value decisions based on appropriate information analysis.
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