What is LTV in Google Analytics?

Buried inside Google Analytics is one of the most powerful reports for understanding which marketing efforts attract your best customers: the Lifetime Value report. While many marketers focus on immediate conversions or cost-per-click, LTV shines a light on long-term profitability. This tutorial will walk you through what the LTV report in Google Analytics is, how to use it, and what its limitations mean for your business.

What is Lifetime Value (LTV)? A Quick Primer

Before diving into Google Analytics, let's quickly define Lifetime Value (LTV), sometimes called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). At its core, LTV is the total net profit a business anticipates earning from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. It answers the question: "How much is one customer worth to us over time?"

Think of a SaaS company with a $30/month subscription. If the average customer stays for 18 months, their LTV is $540 ($30 x 18). For an e-commerce store, if the average customer buys a $50 product three times a year and stays loyal for two years, their LTV is $300 ($50 x 3 x 2).

Why is this so important? LTV frames your customer acquisition strategy:

• It tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a new customer while remaining profitable.
• It helps you identify your most valuable types of customers.
• It highlights the importance of customer retention, not just initial acquisition.

Knowing your LTV prevents you from overspending to acquire customers who make one small purchase and never return, and encourages you to invest in channels that bring in loyal, high-value repeat buyers.

How Google Analytics Calculates LTV

This is where things get specific and often a bit confusing. Google Analytics' LTV is not a true, full-business LTV. Instead, it's a very specific, web-analytics-focused version.

In Google Analytics 4, the Lifetime Value report shows you the cumulative average value generated by users within their first 120 days after acquisition. This is the most critical distinction: you're not seeing the value of a customer over years, but rather a snapshot of their initial behavior after you've acquired them. Previously in Universal Analytics this window was 90 days.

The report measures this "value" using a few key ecommerce and engagement metrics:

• Average purchase revenue: The daily average revenue from purchases, subscriptions, and paid content only.
• Purchase revenue: All revenue from purchase events in the past 120 days.
• LTV Average purchase revenue: A predicted metric on what total of a user is predicted to be in the first 28 days of coming to a site.

Essentially, GA4 tracks a user from the day they were acquired (e.g., from an ad click, an organic search, a social media link) and sums up all the revenue and engagement events associated with that specific user in the following 120 days. It then averages this out across all users acquired during your selected date range and in the same "First User Acquisition Channel".

Finding the Lifetime Value Report in Google Analytics 4

If you've migrated from Universal Analytics, finding reports in GA4 can feel like a scavenger hunt. The User lifetime reports often aren't in the default left-hand navigation. Here’s how to enable and find it.

Step 1: Check Your Navigation

Log in to your GA4 property. In the left-hand menu, look under the Reports section. You may not see a "User lifetime" report listed here by default, depending on your setup.

Step 2: Go to the Library

If you don’t see it, don’t worry. At the bottom of the left-hand menu in the Reporting section, click on Library. The Library is where you can see all available reports and collections and customize your navigation.

Step 3: Publish the "User lifetime" Collection

Inside the Library, you’ll see Cards for "Collections" and "Reports". Look for a collection card named User lifetime. If it's not already published, you'll see an option to publish it.

Click the three vertical dots on the "User lifetime" card and select Publish. This will add the LTV reports to your main reporting navigation menu.

Step 4: View the Report

Now, go back to your Reports section in the main navigation. You should see a new section labeled User lifetime. Click on it, and you'll find the lifetime value data you're looking for!

The report presents a line chart showing the cumulative LTV over the 120-day period following acquisition, and below it, a table that breaks down the user data, often by First user default channel.

How to Use the GA4 LTV Report: Actionable Examples

Now that you know what it is and where to find it, how do you actually make better marketing decisions with this data? Here are a few practical use cases.

1. Identify Your Most Valuable Marketing Channels

This is the most common and powerful use of the LTV report. The table at the bottom defaults to showing you the LTV of users acquired through different channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc.).

Example in Action:

Let's say you see the following data for users acquired in a given period:

• Paid Search: LTV Revenue per user = $5.60
• Organic Search: LTV Revenue per user = $10.20
• Social: LTV Revenue per user = $3.10

This insight is HUGE. It tells you that, on average, a user you acquire through an organic search result is worth nearly twice as much in their first three months as a user you paid for with an ad. Perhaps your SEO content attracts a more qualified, interested audience. This data tells you to double down on your content and SEO strategy, as it's bringing in more profitable customers.

2. Evaluate Campaign Performance Beyond Clicks and Conversions

Often, marketers judge a campaign's success by its initial conversion rate and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). But LTV adds a crucial layer of context.

Example in Action:

Imagine you're running two Google Ads campaigns:

• Campaign A ("40% Off Sale"): Has a high conversion rate and low CPA. It attracts a lot of one-time bargain hunters.
• Campaign B ("Premium Features Showcase"): Has a lower conversion rate and higher CPA. It attracts serious buyers who might make multiple purchases.

Looking at the LTV report broken down by First user campaign, you might find that while Campaign A looks great on the surface, its LTV per user is just $12. Campaign B, however, brings in users with an average LTV of $75.

Without the LTV report, you might have paused Campaign B. With it, you realize Campaign B is actually building a more valuable customer base, and you should optimize it further.

3. Improve Your Ad Bidding Strategy

LTV data can directly inform your advertising bids. If you know that a customer from a particular campaign or keyword is worth, on average, $25 within their first 120 days, you know you can afford to bid higher than your typical CPA target to acquire them, because the value will be realized over time.

Critical Limitations of the LTV Report in GA4

While invaluable, GA4's LTV report is not a perfect, all-inclusive business metric. Understanding its limitations is key to using it correctly.

1. The 120-Day Window: This is the big one. It's a short-term LTV, making it an excellent early performance indicator but a poor measure of true lifetime value for businesses with long sales cycles or annual repeat purchases. If you sell cars, mattresses, or high-ticket B2B software, this report will not be as useful.
2. Revenue-Dependent Data: For the revenue metrics to work, you must have ecommerce tracking properly implemented in GA4. If you don't sell directly online but generate leads, you can measure goal completions as a proxy, but it won't be a true monetary value.
3. It Tracks Revenue, Not Profit: The LTV report shows top-line revenue. It doesn't know your cost of goods sold (COGS), shipping fees, or ad spend. A high-revenue channel could have very low profit margins.
4. Reliance on User Identification: LTV attribution requires GA4 to consistently recognize a user across sessions. This relies on browser cookies (client ID) or a logged-in user state (User-ID). If a user clears cookies or switches from their phone to their laptop without logging in, their value might be fragmented across multiple "users," diluting the data.

Final Thoughts

The Lifetime Value report in Google Analytics is an incredibly useful tool for shifting your mindset from short-term wins to long-term profitability. By showing you a 120-day snapshot of user value, it helps you identify which marketing channels and campaigns are truly growing your business by acquiring high-quality customers, not just one-time visitors.

Calculating true lifetime value, however, often means pulling data from multiple places: your CRM, payment processors like Stripe, your ecommerce platform like Shopify, and your ad platforms. To solve this, we built a tool to do the heavy lifting for you. With Graphed , you can connect all these sources in a few clicks. Instead of wrestling with reports, you can simply ask in plain English, "Show me my LTV by Shopify campaign, broken down by profitability from Stripe," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds. This replaces hours of manual CSV downloads and spreadsheet wrangling with instant, accurate insights.