LTV & LTV:CAC ratio

Ideally it counts gross-margin contribution rather than raw revenue, and the whole relationship rather than the first purchase. The LTV:CAC ratio expresses how much value each acquisition dollar creates.

#A bidding input, not a board-deck metric

Two customers acquired at identical cost can differ by an order of magnitude in lifetime value; reported as equal conversions, the platform optimizes toward whichever is cheaper. Used properly, LTV (or a predicted version of it) becomes the conversion value that value-based bidding strategies bid toward. What it consumes decides its trustworthiness: revenue matched to customers over time, in cohorts (an average over a shifting customer mix lies), on honest margins. Ratio folklore like "3:1 is good" travels badly across business models; treat thresholds as functions of margin and payback.

In practice: the ingredients LTV needs (customer revenue over time, matched to the spend that acquired it) are what Buron's attribution datasets hold.

Calculation, benchmarks, and turning LTV into bidding values: Customer lifetime value for marketers. Predicting value before the CRM knows it: Predictive LTV and value-based bidding for B2B SaaS.