Account for lifetime value | Profit Bidding Guide | GROW
Profit Bidding – The Complete Guide

Section 3 · Calculating your true margins

Account for lifetime value

Lesson 11 of 26 · 1 min read

Extras

The goal of any business is to engage users multiple times: acquire them once, then re-market to them to generate lifetime value, via email marketing, promotions, SMS campaigns and similar.

LTV and post-sale revenue are important parts of your profit bidding and margin calculation. If a new customer is worth more to you than their first order, you can afford to pay a little more to win them.

How to work out your LTV

We recommend you look at your web sales and see how many orders were generated directly from advertising online. Then look at what additional sales these customers made, and the revenue generated. Divide this extra revenue by the number of customers to work out your average LTV per customer.

Example

New customers from online ads last year2,000
Revenue from their repeat orders since£36,000
Average extra revenue per customer£18.00

Tip: to stay on the safe side, use the profit those repeat orders made, not the full revenue. At a 40% margin, £18.00 of repeat revenue is £7.20 of lifetime value.

In time we recommend that you refine this LTV down to product groups.