The ability to think about mobile marketing campaigns from the perspective of an LTV / CAC delta is largely a luxury afforded to developers with substantial balance sheets (or, unfortunately, an existential mistake made by small developers without sufficient expendable cash to finance growth).

Running mobile marketing campaigns against the profitability of LTV over CAC (that is, profitable unit economics of revenues vs. marketing costs) requires some available pool of capital to spend against before cohort revenues make up for the unit costs of acquisition. In other words, because LTV is paid out over some projected time period (eg. 12 months, 18 months, etc.) yet marketing costs are born upfront (usually due within 30 days of a campaign being run), developers need to consider not only the ROI of their campaigns (ie. the degree to which LTV exceeds CAC) but also the schedule of the cashflows that their acquired cohorts generate.

For instance, consider the below logarithmic LTV curve for some cohort definition (geography / network / device / etc.) that produces an 365-day LTV of $1.52 (all charts and their underlying data can be found in this spreadsheet):