Know your lifetime customer value (LTV) by source, by individual affiliate, ad variation, keyword or whatever level of granularity will enable you to best optimize ROI on marketing spend.

Have LTV data by source handy when you are making marketing spend decisions or optimizing campaigns.

Have an LTV marketing optimization strategy that includes:

• A plan for how much you can scale each channel without diminishing returns. For example some Internet retailers find a few keywords to be phenomenally profitable, but they can only scale those terms to the available ad inventory. Often, while a portion of a search or display media campaign under-performs the rest of the campaign in terms of LTV, the company still needs the volume from the other keywords in order to hit revenue targets.

• The frequency that LTV is calculated and is available for optimization. Some companies get daily LTV updates and can track variations in small time periods. Others only batch LTV calculations quarterly and new merchandising mixes or first time media buys will not yield data until the close of the quarter. The most sophisticated online marketers know the frequency with which their customers make repeat purchases, site visits, or other metrics that they track and optimize.

• Your most important metrics and how they relate to each other. For example, many online marketers have their own methodologies for optimizing campaigns. Some reallocate spend every week, month or quarter based on their best/worst performers. Others know that on average their customers make their second purchase 30 days after the first and use this information to assess the success of acquisition channels before scaling spend further.

• Shorter cycle-time CLV optimization. If you know that re-purchasing patterns or churn rates are fairly consistent after 90 days, then use 90 day CLV as your optimization metric and track correlations between initial purchase CLV, first 30 day purchase CLV and 90 day CLV. If your CLV data updates weekly, you can then optimize in 5 weeks and again in 13 weeks after you know how these customers compare to your average customers in terms of repeat purchases. Online marketers are limited in their performance by access to data. The more a marketer can use data to optimize their decisions, the more they will produce results that hit the goals of the company as a whole.