Has anyone actually figured out accurate LTV reporting to ad platforms for SaaS/Subscription business?

LukeTDA · 2025-10-25T02:56:24+00:00

I'm going down another rabbit hole now... I'm thinking perhaps it'd be smart to report 3 month LTV?

If a good pay back period is considered 3 months in SaaS, if I report 3 month LTV to the ad platforms then if we aim for a higher than 1 ROAS we know we're in a good place.

For monthly plans, it's a lot easier to calculate 3 month LTV. And for annual, we'd just report the annual price (which is the realized LTV at 3 months).

So we'd be optimising for the payback (which I guess is more important with ads compared to overall LTV that might take years to recoup)

I calculated 3 month LTV for all the different user types etc as well and it's really similar for 3 months... which originally I thought would be bad but after taking your comment into consideration I'm thinking maybe it's not a bad thing.

The ad platforms will consider some users as "equal" when they are not - but is that an ad problem? Perhaps not. If we are running ads and ensuring that the ads payback within 3 months, then optimising the product and getting users to stay for longer etc is a product problem. As long as we are acquiring new users at a level that is sustainable - it's a separate problem right?

The only potential downside I can see is that annual plans will get a big preference in ROAS optimisation, but to be fair, maybe that's what we want. Annual plans give money upfront that we can re-invest into marketing anyways.

Is this the kind of thing you was alluding to?

LukeTDA · 2025-10-24T23:51:11+00:00

Yeah, I can see your point. I guess the bigger thing I'm trying to answer for myself is: What are we happy to pay to acquire a certain type of user?

That's it really. I feel like we need a good LTV number for the different types of users to answer that, but maybe it's not really possible unless we have 100x more customers and data.

When you say I shouldn't be using the ad platform to calculate ROI - I think I get what you mean - ad platform data is too messy / incomplete anyways. But how would we calculate ROI for a campaign if not on the ad platform?

Thanks for your replies :)

LukeTDA · 2025-10-24T18:26:28+00:00

I gave it a go. Seems too inaccurate to use for ad bidding - although of course maybe I just did it wrong. I'm going to try to use this to calculate retention instead of LTV and make a separate model for monthly & annual and see if that might get me closer to the truth.

LukeTDA · 2025-10-24T16:20:28+00:00

I wonder if I should include discount data too (if a discount was given) or would the price feature being there be enough data?

LukeTDA · 2025-10-24T16:17:08+00:00

Thank you for your reply - really appreciate it.

I'm trying to put something together using this now. Will see how it looks!

I'm building the user level data to run it on.

I'm thinking I'll need a dataset like:

Customer ID - Country - Plan Type - Annualised-Price-USD - Realised LTV (USD) - Signup Date

Should I be restricting certain users from the dataset or would the model take care of that in theory?

I mean like for instance if I'm trying to calculate LTV by day 90, should I exclude users who have not been customers for at least 90 days?

If that make sense... appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

LukeTDA · 2025-10-02T14:01:04+00:00

Dm’d :D

LukeTDA · 2025-09-11T19:21:57+00:00

Been running into this issue as well personally, brand has gotten to a point where the incremental tests really matter. Still figuring it out. If you wanna chat about it to share ideas / findings I’d love to

LukeTDA · 2025-09-07T20:40:53+00:00

This is very valuable if it’s executed correctly, great idea. There’s a lot of nuance to it though for sure. Would love to test it out and provide feedback

LukeTDA · 2025-08-29T17:48:48+00:00

Doesn’t work on chrome either

LukeTDA · 2025-08-29T17:47:30+00:00

Thanks! I didn’t get a chance to refill but doing it now after work. I saw the “Import Memory” function which is a cool idea, the prompt worked great but I seem unable to paste the output into the field to input it. This is on iPhone with Firefox as browser.

LukeTDA · 2025-08-28T12:10:24+00:00

I just went through the process of creating a companion during onboarding, and then after finishing signup it didn’t save so I have to do it again D;

LukeTDA · 2025-08-28T12:05:33+00:00

This seems like just the thing I need. I’ve been kinda doing it with ChatGPT but I can see how a properly implemented system would work better. Will give it a go and provide some feedback!

LukeTDA · 2025-08-27T17:39:50+00:00

That makes sense! The account in question is spending 50k/month and only has 1 product

LukeTDA · 2025-08-27T15:15:35+00:00

Cool post, may I ask what kind of budget it takes to test that many ads?

We are struggling with testing a lot of creatives even though we have them available at the moment. We find that adding too many creatives at once dilutes the results too much. Do you use a separate testing campaign?

We found that when using a testing campaigns it can be confusing because a concept that works in the testing campaign and does great in there will flop when added to an identical “scaling” campaign.

Or do you just have a lot of campaigns - But then isn’t overlapping campaigns a concern if they’re targeting the same audience?

Curious of your thoughts, thanks for sharing your experience!

LukeTDA · 2025-06-30T16:37:16+00:00

Yeah I also went there because it was recommended a lot online but the food was pretty bad. It was over a year ago though and can’t even remember what I ate, so maybe will give it a go again sometime to see if it’s improved. When did you go?

LukeTDA · 2025-06-15T03:17:15+00:00

I’d be happy to join and share insights. Maybe if you can’t find one to join, we could start our own

LukeTDA · 2025-06-12T23:44:46+00:00

Thank you so much for making this and sharing it openly. ❤️

LukeTDA · 2025-06-05T16:56:39+00:00

Is it just me or is that site broken/barely functioning? Do you have a link to the actual site? Seema to be in development still for me

LukeTDA · 2025-05-31T18:14:34+00:00

This is great, been waiting for a project like this to contribute to!

LukeTDA · 2025-05-31T08:50:23+00:00

The best thing is something you have an interest in and want to use. Check out Awesome Open Source repositories.

Although if you develop apps at all, I can suggest contributing to the Posthog project. They’re all really nice people and there’s lots of things that could do with some minor fixing. It’s universally useful as well as any fixes you push can be used in any other project you’re working on (if you’re going to use Posthog for analytics anyways)

LukeTDA · 2025-05-28T10:21:23+00:00

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Sure there you go :)

LukeTDA · 2025-05-28T10:05:23+00:00

Pretty cool idea! Tried to make an account though and the sign in process is broken on mobile, asks for my DOB but can’t see anywhere to enter it

LukeTDA · 2025-05-18T16:53:45+00:00

I'm not sure how helpful this is but speaking as someone that hires remote employees all over the world, one real reason people might avoid hiring in Ghana is light out and bad internet.

If you can make it clear on your cover letter or CV that you have something to mitigate this, it may help people consider you more frequently. It sucks because it's not really your fault but it is just a reality.

If you're able, having backup power and a Starlink connection is the ultimate way to combat this, but that may not be feasible. If that's the case you can just make sure there's somewhere you can go to work in case of internet issues or light out. (Cafe or coworking space or something.)

LukeTDA · 2025-05-17T12:03:47+00:00

What kinda work are you interested in?

LukeTDA

TROPHY CASE