Lifetime Value (Beta) – New Google Analytics report!

Another new report has popped up in some of our clients’ Google Analytics accounts recently – the Lifetime Value report. It’s still in Beta and currently only available for ‘app’ views. Presumably it will be made available across all views at a later date but for now, it’ll only show up for those tracking a mobile app. If it’s available in your account, you’ll find it under Audience -> Lifetime Value.

It’s a welcome addition to the array of reports available within Google Analytics, following on from the recent Active Users and Cohort Analysis reports (both also still in Beta) discussed in previous months on the blog.

The Lifetime Value report is somewhat self-explanatory – it gives us a way to measure the lifetime value of a user – which in turn allows us to determine the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and the overall effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.  It also allows us to compare the CPA for different sources, channels and mediums.

Is a particular campaign or medium more effective, or more efficient than another? Perhaps you’re wasting money on a source which isn’t providing an adequate return to justify the expenditure? This report will give you the data to work these things out.

How does the report work?

The x-axis of the graph represents 90 days and can be viewed in daily/weekly/monthly increments. The starting date is the date of acquisition (which can be any time during the Acquisition Date Range selected) and the graph shows how the cumulative metric values change over time.

In short, you pick a range of dates for when users were acquired, and the report will show you the average of whichever metric you’ve chosen for the users that visited the site for the first time between those dates.

Here are the metrics currently available in the Lifetime Value report:

– Appviews Per User
– Goal Completions Per User
– Revenue Per User
– Session Duration Per User
– Sessions Per User
– Transactions Per User

How can you use this report?

There are many ways you could use the data from this report but here’s an example: say you had a payday campaign running on the last Friday of the month – you could select that date as the acquisition date, choose Revenue Per User as the metric and the report would then show you the average Lifetime Value of the users acquired on that date based on their interactions since then.

You can also look at the data within the context of Source/Channel/Medium to see where your most (or least) valuable traffic came from and adjust future marketing campaigns accordingly.

Do you have access to the Lifetime Value Report yet? If so, comment below and let us know how you’re using it!