LTV Analysis: Cumulative LTV & Payback | Keentics

LTV analysis tells you how much a cohort of users is worth over time — and, just as importantly, when that value crosses what it cost to acquire them. For studios and buy-side teams, it is the metric that decides whether a campaign scales or stops. Keentics computes cumulative lifetime value on full revenue events, so the payback curve you show your CFO matches the money that actually landed. See the lifetime value glossary entry for the formal definition.

The cumulative LTV matrix

The core view is a cohort-by-day LTV matrix: each row is an acquisition cohort, each column is days since install, and each cell is cumulative revenue per user up to that day. Read across a row to see how a cohort’s value accumulates; read down a column to compare LTV at a fixed horizon across cohorts. This is how you answer “what is our D30 LTV, and is it trending up?” without exporting anything to a spreadsheet.

ARPU, ARPPU and the payment distribution

Average revenue per user (ARPU) and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) sit on top of the same data and tell different stories. A flat ARPU with rising ARPPU means fewer payers spending more — a classic whale-heavy economy. Keentics also charts the payment distribution, the histogram of how much individual users spend, so you can see the gap between the median payer and the top spenders rather than hiding it in an average.

Connect LTV to acquisition

LTV only means something next to cost. Split the LTV matrix by acquisition channel, campaign or country and line it up against spend to get effective ROAS and a payback window per source. That is how you find the channel that looks expensive on day 0 but pays back by day 14, and kill the one that never does. Because the same cohorts power retention analysis, you can see exactly which retention curve is driving which payback curve.

Why teams pick Keentics for LTV

• Cumulative LTV on full revenue events, no sampling and no per-project pricing.
• ARPU, ARPPU and payment distribution in one place, including whale-curve views for game analytics.
• Channel-level payback and ROAS to connect value back to spend.
• Read-only SQL and full export, so finance can reconcile every number against raw ClickHouse events.

LTV is where retention, monetization and acquisition meet. If you are mapping your stack, see how Keentics compares as a ThinkingData alternative, or start from the conversion funnel and cohort concepts that feed it.