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Lifetime value (LTV)

Lifetime value (LTV) is the total revenue a single user generates across their whole lifetime with your product — every purchase, subscription renewal and ad impression they ever produce. It is the number that tells you how much a user is actually worth, and therefore how much you can afford to pay to acquire one. Without LTV, every marketing decision is a guess.

How it is calculated

The simplest definition is cumulative LTV for a cohort:

LTV = total revenue from a cohort / number of users in that cohort

In practice you measure it as a curve over time, just like retention. Day-7, day-30, day-90 and day-180 LTV show how much a typical user has paid by that point. Early LTV is what you can measure today; mature LTV is what you ultimately care about. Because few teams can wait 180 days for an answer, predicted LTV (pLTV) uses the early curve and known retention to forecast where a cohort will land.

A common decomposition for games and apps is:

LTV ≈ ARPDAU × average lifetime (days), or equivalently revenue per user driven by retention, conversion to payer, and average spend per payer.

Why it matters

LTV only means something next to its cost. The core relationship every growth team lives by is:

LTV / CAC — lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost.

If LTV exceeds CAC with healthy margin, you can spend more to grow; if it does not, scaling acquisition just loses money faster. LTV also underpins ROAS (return on ad spend) targets: knowing your day-30 LTV lets you set a day-30 ROAS goal that keeps user acquisition profitable. See attribution for how spend gets tied back to the users it bought.

In games and apps

Game LTV is rarely uniform — it is dominated by a small set of high-spending whales, so average LTV hides a long tail. Teams therefore look at LTV by payer segment, by acquisition channel and by country, and watch how the LTV curve bends as live-ops events and offers land. A channel with lower install volume but higher LTV often beats a cheap channel that brings users who never pay.

In Keentics

Keentics builds cumulative and per-cohort LTV straight from your raw revenue events, so the curve matches your actual ledger. You can split LTV by channel, segment whales out, and line it up against the retention curve that drives it. Explore the full LTV analysis feature for accumulation and forecasting, and the pricing page for plan details.

Related: Active users · ARPPU · ARPU · Attribution