Most subscription businesses have negative ROAS in the first 30 days and positive ROAS by month 6 or 12. If you only look at month-1 numbers, you’ll cut profitable channels because they look unprofitable in the short window. The cohort LTV report is the antidote.
Building the report
Group rows by trial-start month and source. Add columns for Spend, MRR contribution at 30/60/90/180/365 days, and ROAS at each horizon. Use Source-Specific attribution and a Lifetime window.
Add columns for cumulative customers and cumulative gross revenue per cohort. The ratio of cumulative revenue to spend at each horizon is the cohort’s ROAS at that horizon — which is the number you actually want to see.
- Rows: trial-start month × source
- Columns: Spend, Customers, MRR @30/60/90/180/365 days, Cumulative Revenue, ROAS
- Model: Source-Specific
- Window: Lifetime
- Compare to target CAC payback (typically 6–18 months for B2B SaaS)
Identifying patient channels
Some channels — especially top-of-funnel content, awareness, and ABM — show poor month-1 ROAS but strong year-1 ROAS. Those are the channels that need patient capital and longer attribution windows.
Other channels show flat ROAS across the entire horizon, which usually means the customers they bring in churn fast. That’s a quality problem, not a horizon problem, and the answer is to fix the audience or pause the channel.
What to watch for.
- Reporting LTV without cohort segmentation
Aggregate LTV hides massive channel variance. Always segment by acquisition source.
- Cutting channels on month-1 ROAS
Most paid PLG channels have negative month-1 ROAS by design. Use 6- or 12-month cohort ROAS for budget decisions.
- Ignoring churn in the LTV calculation
LTV without churn is fantasy. Model expected churn into the LTV column or pull it directly from Stripe.
Recap.
- Use Source-Specific attribution to credit channels even when journeys are multi-touch
- Set the attribution window to Lifetime
- Track gross MRR contribution from each cohort, not just first-payment revenue
- Compare LTV ROAS to your CAC payback target (most B2B SaaS uses 6–18 months)
- Identify channels where year-1 ROAS is poor but year-2 ROAS is excellent — those need patient spend