LTV by Acquisition Channel Benchmarks

CAC by Channel tells you what it costs to acquire a customer from each source. LTV by acquisition channel tells you what those customers are worth over time. You need both to compute LTV:CAC per channel, which is the actual profitability signal — CAC alone routinely makes cheap channels look better than they are.

First-touch is the right default. You're asking 'which channel introduced this customer to the brand?' — last-touch over-credits owned channels (email, direct) for repeat orders the customer would have placed regardless. Some teams run both and use first-touch for budget decisions, last-touch for campaign optimisation.

Twelve months is the standard reporting window for most online stores, because it covers a full seasonal cycle and at least 2-3 repeat-purchase opportunities for consumables. For considered-purchase categories (furniture, electronics) extend to 18-24 months. Anything under 6 months mostly reflects first-order AOV differences, not real LTV.

Paid social intercepts demand you haven't earned yet, often with a discount hook — that selects for price-sensitive, low-intent buyers. Organic search finds people who already know they want what you sell. The LTV gap is real, but it doesn't mean Meta is unprofitable — it means Meta needs a lower CAC ceiling to clear the same LTV:CAC bar.

Tag the customer record with first-touch UTM source at order creation (most analytics plugins do this automatically) and group orders by that tag in a cohort report. Metricuno's Shopify plugin pulls historical orders plus UTM history on install, so the channel-level LTV report is populated from day one rather than starting at zero.

3:1 is the common floor for paid channels — below that, you're not generating enough margin to cover overhead and reinvest. Owned channels (email, referral) routinely clear 10:1 and shouldn't be benchmarked against paid. The more useful comparison is each paid channel against itself over time: is LTV:CAC trending up or down quarter-over-quarter?

Not immediately — first check whether it's a top-of-funnel feeder for higher-LTV channels. Meta often acquires customers who later convert through Google brand search; killing Meta drops brand-search volume two months later. Run a 4-6 week incrementality test before reallocating budget based on channel-level LTV alone.

TikTok LTV tends to run 15-25% below Meta for the same store, driven by younger audience, lower AOV, and weaker repeat-purchase behaviour. CAC is usually lower too, so the LTV:CAC ratio can be similar — but contribution margin per customer is smaller in absolute terms, which matters more than the ratio when you're scaling spend.

Channel is one dimension of LTV segmentation — others include first product purchased, discount-acquired vs full-price, geography, and acquisition cohort month. Channel is usually the highest-leverage cut because it maps directly to budget decisions, but combining channel × first-product often reveals the real profit drivers (e.g. 'Meta customers who bought the hero SKU' may behave very differently from 'Meta customers who bought a discounted bundle').

It overstates them, not understates. Last-click gives email credit for repeat orders that any well-acquired customer would have placed, and gives organic credit for branded searches driven by paid awareness. First-touch corrects both. If your LTV-by-channel report shows email at 30x LTV:CAC, you're almost certainly looking at a last-click view.