LTV
Also: Lifetime Value · Customer Lifetime Value · CLV
LTV (lifetime value) is the total revenue a user is expected to generate over their relationship with an app. In mobile UA it is almost always expressed per user in a cohort and at a fixed age — D30 LTV, D180 LTV — rather than as a true lifetime figure.
LTV (Dn) = Cohort revenue within n days ÷ Users in cohort
Two variants exist and they are not interchangeable. LTV per customer divides by everyone in the cohort, payers and non-payers; this is the number to compare against CPI. LTV per paying customer divides only by those who paid; it is useful for pricing and useless for UA math, because you did not buy only payers.
Realized LTV counts revenue that arrived. Predicted LTV extrapolates a curve. Use predicted for planning and realized for weekly budget decisions.
Common mistake
Quoting an LTV without saying which denominator produced it. A $48 LTV per paying customer with a 4% payer rate is a $1.92 LTV per customer.
Go deeper: D30 realized LTV from cohorts
Related terms
In Roasy
Roasy computes this across every ad network, Adjust, and RevenueCat on one screen — real revenue, cohort windows, and the same definition everywhere.