Realized LTV per Customer Chart

Definition

Realized LTV (Lifetime Value) per Customer (sometimes also called Average Revenue per User, ARPU) shows the actual revenue (minus refunds) that was generated by a customer cohort, divided by the number of customers in that cohort.

Therefore, this chart tells you how much revenue you generate on average from each customer. To see how much revenue you generate per paying customer, check out the Realized LTV per Paying Customer chart.

Available settings

• Filters: Yes
• Segments: Yes
• Customer Lifetime: Yes

Customer cohorts

This chart is cohorted by the earliest date that a customer:

1. Was "first seen" (first opened your app), or
2. Made their first purchase (for purchases made outside of your app, like promoted purchases in the App Store)

Example

If a customer first opened your app on April 15th, 2022, but didn't make a purchase until May 21st, 2022, they would be included in the April 15th cohort.

Customer Lifetime

Using the “Customer Lifetime” selector, you can define the time period after the customer was first seen that revenue should be counted within.

For example, by setting the “Customer Lifetime” selector to 30 days, all revenue generated by a new customer cohort in their first 30 days will be summed and included in the measurement, but any revenue generated after those initial 30 days will be discarded.

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Switch to "Unbounded for a view of all revenue for that customer cohort.

Incomplete periods

In addition, since the Customer Lifetime setting determines how long each customer cohort is given before it’s considered fully mature, the periods which are marked as incomplete will change based on that setting.

For example, by setting the “Customer Lifetime” selector to 3 months, all periods which are less than 3 months old will be marked as incomplete, since new revenue generated by those customer cohorts would still be added to the measurement.

Distinguishing between complete and incomplete periods is important for accurately interpreting the behavior of your cohorts and understanding whether a change is simply due to one cohort being less mature than another, or a true underlying performance difference.

How to use Realized LTV per Customer in your business

Realized LTV per Customer gives you an overall view how the monetization of customer cohorts has developed over time. A common use case is to compare a certain customer lifetime (e.g. 30 days) for users acquired in different months. You can then connect the results with what happened in your product or marketing during those months to compare impact.

Realized LTV per Customer can also be used as a tool to understand the profitability of (paid) acquisition. By comparing the Realized LTV per Customer for a given cohort with the average Customer Acquisition Cost for that cohort, you can calculate the acquisition profitability.

Calculation

For each period, we measure:

1. New Customers: The count of new customers first seen by RevenueCat within the period.
2. Realized LTV: The amount of revenue generated by that cohort of new customers within the selected Customer Lifetime, minus refunds.

Formula

1. [Realized LTV] / [New Customers] = Realized LTV per Customer

FAQs

Question	Answer
Which users of my app are considered “customers”?	Anyone using your app is considered a “customer” by RevenueCat, regardless of whether they’ve made a purchase, similar to how unique “installs” or “users” might be measured by other services. The count of “New Customers” for any period excludes any customers who have been aliased. Learn more about identifying customers and aliasing here.
Does Realized LTV measure revenue before or after store commissions, fees, and taxes?	Realized LTV is calculated using the total revenue generated from each customer cohort, minus refunds, and therefore it does include revenue that the stores may deduct from your Proceeds due to commissions, taxes, or fees.
Why does the count of New Customers not change when filtering by Product, Product Duration, Store, or Offering?	These filters are only applicable to subscribers because a customer does not have a designated “product” unless they make a purchase. Because of this, when using filters that only apply to subscribers, only the Realized LTV measure will be filtered.
Can I change the default Customer Lifetime selection?	Unfortunately we don’t support changing the default at this time, but you can save a custom version of this chart with your preferred Customer Lifetime for easy access to that configuration. Learn more about Saving Charts here.
How can I use Realized LTV to measure my CAC payback time?	By setting the Customer Lifetime selector to the length of time you’re expecting to payback your customer acquisition costs (CAC) within, you can see whether your Realized LTV at that length of time is greater or less than your CAC for the same period.