LTV & LTV:CAC ratio

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the total value (revenue, or better, gross-margin contribution) a customer generates over the whole relationship, not just the first purchase. The LTV:CAC ratio divides it by customer acquisition cost, expressing how much value each acquisition dollar creates.

#A bidding input, not a finance vanity metric

LTV's job isn't decorating a board deck. It's repricing what a conversion is worth to your bidding. Two customers who convert at identical cost can differ by an order of magnitude in lifetime value; feed both to the platform as equal conversions and it optimizes toward whichever is cheaper to acquire. Used properly, LTV (or a predicted version of it) becomes the conversion value that value-based strategies bid toward. What the metric consumes decides its trustworthiness: revenue matched to customers over time, cohorts to expose mix shifts (because an average LTV over a shifting customer mix lies), and honest margins. Ratio folklore like "3:1 is good" travels badly across business models; treat thresholds as functions of margin and payback, not universal constants.

Buron computes LTV from attribution-dataset revenue: actual customer revenue over time matched against the spend that acquired it, rather than a formula over averages.

Calculation, benchmarks, and turning LTV into bidding values is the full page: Customer lifetime value for marketers: how to calculate, benchmark, and use it. Predicting value before the CRM knows it is Predictive LTV and value-based bidding for B2B SaaS, the strategy that consumes it is Value-based bidding, and conversion tracking maps the wider territory.