Full Answer

The standard LTV formula — average order value multiplied by purchase frequency multiplied by customer lifespan — breaks down for subscriptions because it treats every subscriber as interchangeable. A subscriber acquired through a Facebook retargeting campaign may renew for fourteen months while one from a broad-match Google Ads campaign churns after three. Blending them into a single LTV number means you overspend on the channel that delivers short-lived subscribers and underspend on the one that delivers durable revenue.

WooCommerce Subscriptions stores the data you need — renewal dates, cancellation dates, subscription totals — but it does not calculate per-source LTV natively. You have to join subscription records with first-touch attribution data, which means your tracking must capture the original acquisition source and carry it through to the subscription object. Metorik's subscription analytics layer can surface churn and revenue cohorts, but the attribution join still depends on clean first-party event data reaching your warehouse.

The practical sequence is: capture first-touch source server-side so it survives ad blockers and cookie expiry, store it against the WooCommerce customer record, then run cohort queries that group subscribers by source and measure revenue and churn independently. Twelve renewal cycles is the minimum window — anything shorter overstates LTV because early churn has not yet surfaced. Once you have per-source LTV, compare it against per-source acquisition cost. The channel where LTV-to-CAC ratio exceeds three is where your next dollar should go. The one where it sits below one is where you are subsidising losses with margin from better channels.