How does LTV impact gambling profit, and how to increase it?

Hello, community! In gambling today, only the strongest survive. This is driven by both high competition and the overall complexity of the niche. To earn steady profit here, it’s not enough to simply send traffic to a link. You also need to support it throughout the entire period of activity — over its lifetime. 

To describe a lead’s active period, marketers use the LTV metric. What is it, how important is it, and how do you keep it healthy? Find out in today’s overview. 

Before we begin, a quick reminder that we recently covered why it’s worth running traffic to gamified gambling. Recommended! 

What Is LTV? 

LTV — short for “lifetime value” — is a marketing metric that shows a customer’s lifetime value. In other words, it reflects how much money a lead has spent and how much profit they generate over their entire relationship with a platform or seller.  

You’ll see this metric in many niches. Because of that, there’s no single universal formula for calculating it. Depending on the vertical, you choose the most appropriate way to compute LTV.  

We’re used to seeing LTV specifically in gambling — especially if we plan to work on revshare. In this vertical, LTV is determined by several factors:  

1. The average number of deposits within a given period; 
2. Their size; 
3. The total time a player has spent in the casino. 

Accordingly, the formula is very simple:  

A × B × C = LTV 

However, it’s hard to miss that we’re dealing with a highly dynamic metric, so any formula will be somewhat superficial. How much a player deposits isn’t a static variable: today it might be $20, and tomorrow three deposits of $50 each. 

But we don’t actually need the final LTV number. What matters much more are its components — the levers we should work on to increase profit.  

If a player churned and we simply calculated their LTV, that alone gives us nothing. But if we monitor the metric continuously and see that certain actions — or inaction — lead to changes, we must know how to respond. That’s what helps us scale profits over time. 

How to Maintain LTV — and What That Really Means 

The biggest profits in gambling go not to those who bring the most traffic, but to those who know how to work that traffic afterward. Yes, that’s not only the casino’s job — it’s ours, too. How does it work? 

Most casinos offer various tools affiliates can use to manage traffic and maximize profit. These include: 

1. Bonuses. Not only for registration, but also cashbacks, rakebacks, reloads — anything that motivates players to return even after a loss. 
2. VIP systems. If you’re dealing with a high-roller, a personal approach and tailored offers help keep them engaged.  

The offer itself must also meet certain requirements if we want consistently high profit. A solid casino should: 

1. Provide stable and convenient deposit and withdrawal methods. 
2. Offer professional, 24/7 customer support.  
3. Keep its catalog of games and slots updated to retain experienced, “hardcore” players. 

Therefore, choose only proven, high-quality offers. That’s your best guarantee that the money spent on traffic will convert into profit.  

How Can an Affiliate Influence LTV? 

Naturally, the key question is how we — affiliates — can directly influence lifetime value. Suppose the advertiser lets us offer bonuses to players. How do we reach them for retention to invite them into a promo? 

First, warm up the traffic. For example, use gamified pre-landers to spark interest even before the user registers at the casino. 

But the best option today is using PWAs. Mobile apps keep you “one tap away” from your traffic. This means you can interact with leads directly and, through retention, promote any offers: bonuses, promos, cashbacks — or simply remind users that they have the app installed. 

PWAs give us plenty of tools to sustain LTV. One of the main ones is push notifications, which let us “revive” traffic that has suddenly gone inactive. 

With PWAs and Pre-landers, We Can: 

Gamify our ad campaign. This can even compensate when the offer itself isn’t gamified at all — though we still recommend avoiding such products, as they’re simply not competitive today. 

Promote any bonuses. Did the advertiser give you a custom promo with a deposit bonus? Use pushes to inform your traffic about it.  

Use retargeting if an offer has run its course. Why keep traffic in a casino that doesn’t bring you profit if you can redirect leads to another offer? With a PWA, you’ll have plenty of tools for this (especially if it’s your own app). 

As an alternative to PWAs, you can use other interactive channels — e.g., social media pages or messengers, which are often used to siphon scheme traffic. But PWA is the trend — ignoring it means falling behind competitors.  

What Should Your LTV Be? 

To understand whether your LTV is “healthy,” you need to account for other metrics. Most marketers relate LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) — how much you spend on average to acquire a single lead.  

CAC is calculated simply: take the amount spent on the ad campaign and divide it by the number of leads acquired: 

Spent $1,000 / received 100 leads = CAC is $10 

David Skok, a well-known American entrepreneur and economist, argues that LTV should be at least three times higher than CAC. That’s the “math” modern marketing generally follows when talking about a “good LTV.” Note that in this formula, LTV is understood as the actual amount of money a customer brought you over their lifetime. 

It’s also important to remember that CAC isn’t always easy to calculate accurately — especially in affiliate marketing, where we have many different costs. So it’s entirely possible that for your campaign, a different LTV level will be “normal.” Obviously, our goal is to maintain a positive ROI. Plan for that in advance.  

Conclusion 

Retaining players is usually much cheaper than acquiring new ones — specifically in terms of ROI, the ratio of costs to profits. Of course, it can be more demanding in human resources, especially time. The most effective way to keep traffic “alive” is through retention, which often means contacting customers directly — particularly VIP players and high-rollers. 

We’re talking about one of the most profitable niches in affiliate marketing. It’s only logical that there’s no easy money here. But the size of your eventual paycheck should definitely motivate investment in your ad campaigns: building quality funnels, using modern PWAs, and continuously supporting players to encourage deposit after deposit. 

Do you work with gambling? If so, share your methods for sustaining LTV in our Telegram community, the hub of Ukrainian affiliate marketing!  

Sincerely, Your Geek! 

How LTV Affects Profit in Gambling — FAQs