Cohort LTV

Cohort LTV is the cumulative revenue of a group of customers acquired in a shared window, tracked over time from the moment of acquisition.

Cohort LTV is the more honest version of customer lifetime value, because instead of one average number for everyone it plots revenue for a specific cohort along a time axis from acquisition and lets you see how it accumulates month by month. Its main advantage is that the only exactly measurable part is the realised value of cohorts that have matured; the continuation of the curve for young cohorts is a fit, not an observation. That same separation makes two cohorts comparable: if the June cohort has accumulated more by its third month than the May cohort, acquisition quality has improved. But the same lifetime-value ambiguity applies here too: revenue or margin, and where the numerator comes from. Without transaction data this metric is not computable in currency and a behavioral proxy must be used instead.