Lifetimely is a powerful Shopify analytics tool that provides deep insights into customer lifetime value, real-time profit tracking, and marketing performance. Key features include comprehensive profit and loss dashboards, predictive LTV modeling, detailed customer behavior analytics, and a new attribution suite for optimizing marketing channels. Lifetimely's robust feature set and competitive pricing make it a top choice for Shopify brands looking to gain data-driven visibility into their business and make more informed decisions.
Lifetimely is known as one of the best and most popular analytics tools in the Shopify ecosystem. If you’ve used Lifetimely before, then you likely already know why. But if you haven’t used the tool before, then this breakdown is for you.
Below, we are going to explore some of the top features that Lifetimely offers and go deep into what you can do with them, how they can help improve your business’ performance and more. We’ll also touch on a few of Lifetimely’s newest product features, like attribution, and how it can fit into your overall data analytics stack.
Then we’ll compare Lifetimely’s pricing model to a few other tools in the category and give you our overall recommendation. Let’s get started.
Lifetimely is a Shopify analytics tool that helps brands optimize their profitability by providing deep insights into customer lifetime value, real-time profit tracking, and marketing performance. Lifetimely, while initially known for their best-in-class customer cohort analysis reports, now offers brands a few key product features:
Shopify brands from $250K/year in revenue up to over $100M/year in revenue all leverage Lifetimely to make more money. The tool is best-in-class at helping operators and marketers uncover insights that allow them to make better investment and marketing decisions. For example, Lifetimely can answer all of these questions for you:
One of the most widely used features in Lifetimely is their Daily Profit & Loss Dashboard. It’s the first screen you’ll see every time you login to the app. When you onboard with Lifetimely, they help you set up all of your costs and connect all of your marketing channels so that you can create your profit dashboard.
Lifetimely's real-time profit and loss dashboard gives brands a centralized command center to monitor financial performance and make data-driven business decisions.
The profit dashboard and tracking only takes about 10-15 minutes to set up depending on how many custom costs you have in your business and on how much tweaking you need to do to the cost data you already have in Shopify. Once you have it set up, it becomes fully automated so that you can always have an accurate profit and loss dashboard in your pocket to view.
Lifetimely will take your Shopify COGs data, your transaction gateway costs, shipping and handling expenses and all custom expenses (personnel, software, etc) to help you create a dashboard that shows you exactly how much profit you make each day. Once you’re confident in your costs and have all of your channels connected, then you can toggle around with different time frames in Lifetimely to explore your business performance in more detail.
The profit dashboard, the main screen in Lifetimely, will show you critical business data each time you login, including revenue, product costs, marketing costs and your net profit. The dashboard is clean, easy to digest and can help you easily understand how all of these metrics change over time.
Another small feature of Lifetimely we like is their daily email reports. You can turn on the setting and add in specific emails so that you can have your key business metrics sent to you and your team every morning (up to 5 unique email addresses).
Truly understanding your customer’s LTV is critical to feeling comfortable with spending lots of money to acquire customers in the first place. Lifetimely offers best-in-class lifetime value analytics that help brands build smarter customer acquisition and retention strategies based on deep insights into customer segments.
You can customize the Lifetime Value Report in Lifetimely to show pretty much anything you want to know about how your customers perform over time. Not only can you adjust the time frame of the report to be whatever you’d like (as far back as your historical data goes), but you can also choose from over 13 different metrics to view, including:
It’s great to always have a strong understanding of your customer LTV and CAC:LTV ratios and Lifetimely makes it easy to digest and act against. The tool can show you exactly how much you can spend on marketing to acquire customers before losing money and when you can expect to make your money back – they have a small (but highly useful) feature where you can add a green bar directly on your cohort waterfall chart to show exactly when your CAC payback hits.
While cohort analysis and LTV metrics aren’t unique to Lifetimely, the tool definitely offers a cohort analysis that is “on steroids” and offers so much more customization and granularity than other tools.
For example, in Lifetimely, instead of just viewing accumulated sales per customer over time (the typical way the LTV or CAC:LTV numbers are created), you can use metrics like accumulated gross margin per customer or accumulated contribution margin per customer to view your business through a profit-first lens. Because that’s really the only thing that should matter!
When you go into Lifetimely and navigate to the Lifetime Value Report, you’ll see a tab called LTV Drivers. This report automatically ranks all of your products, customer tags, discounts and more based on how strongly they correlate with your LTV. On the first screen, it will show you exactly who is driving the most LTV in your customer file - it could be customers with a certain tag, a specific product or a specific discount code.
If you notice in the LTV Drivers report that customers with tag XYZ have the highest 6-month LTV, then you go into your Cohort Analysis report, filter to only show customers with that tag and drill down further to learn more about these customers - when did you acquire them all? What product did they purchase first? How do they compare in LTV to customers with tag ABC? Lifetimely’s Cohorts and LTV Drivers helps you digest this all.
In the Cohort Analysis, you can also filter by source which is a popular use case of the tool. Say all of your new customers that you acquired over BFCM received the customer tag XYZ - you can filter them into the LTV Cohort Report and then you can drill further to understand which first-touch source (where the customers came from) is the most valuable to your business. You’ll likely be able to find that customers have different values to your business depending on where and when you acquired them.
Another feature we like in Lifetimely’s LTV analysis is their Predictive LTV Modelling. Lifetimely pulls in all of your historical data as well as millions of data points from thousands of D2C brands to help calculate the predicted LTVs of your customers. You can use this report to get a solid understanding of how much the customers you are acquiring today might be worth in a few months.
Lifetimely’s AI is able to learn based on how your historical customer cohorts have performed based on their entry products, AOVs, tags, discounts and so much more to help create this value. Of course it won’t be 100% spot on, but you can make use of it to help you forecast your acquisition efforts, inventory and overall business performance more accurately.
Understanding exactly how your customers behave – from their first order to their fourth (and well beyond) – is critical to growing a profitable D2C brand. Lifetimely offers some of the most comprehensive customer behavior analytics available. The tool leverages three core reports that work together to give you the full picture of how your customers are performing.
The Product Journey Report is one of the most popular reports - it visualizes exactly how your customers move through your product catalog over time. The report creates intuitive "noodle" diagrams that show you the most common paths customers take after their first purchase.
It can very quickly give you an idea of what product journey is the most popular and profitable with your customers. Like with Lifetimely’s LTV analysis, you can add a ton of filters to this report too. You can understand the product journey of specific customer cohorts based on the discount code they used, the marketing channel you acquired them on, their answers to post-purchase survey questions and more.
For example, you might notice that customers who start with your sample product are way more likely to buy your premium subscription pack on their second order compared to customers who start with something else. Or you might see that customers who buy Product A rarely come back for a second purchase, while customers who buy Product B have a super high retention rate.
While the Product Journey Report shows you WHAT product customers are buying and in what order, the Time Lag Between Orders report shows you WHEN they're buying those products. This report breaks down exactly how long it takes customers to make their second, third, and fourth purchases. You can see what percentage of your repeat purchases happen within key windows like 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, etc. You can add a bunch of filters to narrow down specific types of customers too.
For example, you can leverage these insights to figure when exactly to trigger specific retention marketing efforts, like email flows. If you know your customers are most likely to place their second order after 30 days go by, then you can set up and customize a flow in Klaviyo for that cohort right around that timeline.
Or, if you notice that customers are most likely to try a different product on their second order from you after 30 days, you can build a Klaviyo flow to directly introduce them to all of the other products in your catalog and drive up your AOV. Combining the Product Journey report and the Time Lag report can help you get in front of your customer at the exact right moment with the exact right message.
Lastly, the Funnel Report lets you build custom customer journeys to answer those "I wonder how many customers..." questions that keep coming up. For example, you can figure out how many customers bought your sample pack offer, joined your referral program, and then converted to a subscription. Or how many customers bought your three core products in any order at the same time. Lifetimely’s Funnel Report will show you not just how many completed the whole journey, but exactly where in the process most customers drop off.
One other key report to leverage is the Repurchase Rate Report. While it’s fairly straightforward, the visualization that Lifetimely offers can help you digest exactly how your repurchase rate changes throughout the year. You can see exactly how many new customers repurchase within 30 days, 90 days, 180 days and 365 days – same with existing returning customers (to get an idea of their purchase frequency).
You can also add the same filters onto this report as you can with the other ones – marketing channel, discount codes, customer tags, post-purchase survey answers and more.
Lifetimely also just launched a new set of product features for tracking and optimizing your marketing channels. You’ll be able to find the new feature set in the “Attribution” section of the platform. The suite of new attribution features provide a centralized, data-driven command center to track, measure, and optimize the performance of all your marketing channels.
First, you can now get a bird's-eye view of attribution across all your key marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok and more. Lifetimely pulls in the actual platform data so you can see reported revenue, spend, CPC, CAC, and ROAS for each specific channel and manipulate the time frame however you’d like.
Lifetimely also launched their own third-party tracking pixel which you can add to your site. This will allow you to compare their third-party pixel metrics with those of the actual ad platforms. We don’t necessarily advise using the third-party pixel as your ultimate source of truth, since the ad platforms can’t fully optimize against it yet, but we do think it’s a good “second opinion” to have in your back pocket to understand your marketing performance. Lifetimely is actively improving on the Lifetimely Pixel, so expect to see new developments in the near future.
The Lifetimely Pixel lets you identify any reporting discrepancies and find hidden opportunities you may have missed just looking at the native channel reports.
The dashboards themselves are super clean and easy to digest. You can quickly spot anomalies, like a sudden 150% spike in Saturday morning Facebook ad spend. Lifetimely will automatically detect abnormalities in performance/pacing like that and alert you, so you can jump in and take action if needed.
You can also drill all the way down into individual marketing campaigns to see which ones are truly driving the most profitable impact to your business. Right in these drill down dashboards, you can compare Lifetimely's pixel data to the platforms' attribution.
We think Lifetimely's latest analytics upgrade reflects the tool’s overall goal of giving brands a robust, data-driven “command center” for more profitable growth. It’s a brand new feature that launched this past quarter, so there will likely be some hiccups off the bat, but it’s included in all price plans and a no brainer to leverage.
Ad platforms are incentivized to show you that their performance is the best, even if it isn’t, so you spend more money with them. That’s why having an impartial view of your performance data, via a third-party pixel, can be so valuable. Let the truth of performance guide you, not the biased view that Meta, Google or others offer!
Custom Dashboards - In Lifetimely, you can create unlimited custom dashboards that pull in every marketing data source you have, giving you the ability to track everything from blended ad spend to campaign-specific ROAS in one place. Every team member can build their own views with drag-and-drop modules, making it dead simple to monitor exactly what matters to their role and make quick, data-driven decisions.
Benchmarking - With Lifetimely’s benchmarking tool, you can see exactly where you rank across 11 essential KPIs including net sales, gross margin, and AOV, plus get clear targets for breaking into the top 25% of performers. We particularly like how the tool offers an overall performance score - it gives you an instant read on your business health and helps you quickly identify which metrics need the most attention to stay competitive in your category.
Integrations - While not exactly a product feature, we think it’s worth calling out that Lifetimely offers a ton of useful integrations for brands. You can integrate almost every advertising channel into Lifetimely and other key apps like Recharge, ShipStation and more. If you’re a subscription brand that uses a different tool like Skio, Smartrr or Stay AI, then you won’t be able to use Lifetimely’s Subscription Churn Report since it’s for Recharge only, but that’s it.
Lifetimely is a robust analytics tool designed for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands using Shopify. It provides detailed insights into customer lifetime value (LTV), profit and loss tracking, and predictive analytics. The platform allows businesses to integrate various data sources, customize dashboards, and benchmark performance against industry standards. With Lifetimely, brands can make data-driven decisions to enhance profitability and customer retention.
Now - let’s talk about Lifetimely’s pricing model and compare it to a few other options in the space.Lifetimely's pricing stands out when you look at what you actually get for your money. Let's break down the monthly cost for a brand doing $5M/year in revenue with a $50 AOV (~8,500 orders/month):
Lifetimely: $499/month (XL Plan)
Triple Whale: $1,149/month (Premium Plan)
Peel: $809/month (Accelerate Plan)
Polar: $350/month (Analyze Plan)
When you look at everything Lifetimely offers with their platform (complete P&L tracking, deep cohort analysis, predictive LTV modeling, customer behavior analytics, attribution and more), the monthly cost becomes pretty minimal. You get enterprise-level analytics capabilities that can directly impact your bottom line, all at a price point that's surprisingly cheap compared to similar tools in the market.
They also offer all brands a 14-day free trial of the platform, so you can get fully set up and try it out for two weeks before having to decide whether it’s the right tool for your business.
Think about it this way: if you're using Lifetimely to its full potential - tracking your true PnL daily, understanding which customer segments drive the most value, and making better marketing decisions based on LTV insights - the monthly cost is just a tiny drop in the bucket.
You can view Lifetimely’s full pricing breakdown here.
Of course, the best way to see if Lifetimely is the right fit in your tech stack is to see it in action. Lifetimely offers everyone a 14-day free trial, regardless of your GMV. It’ll take you about a day or two to get everything set up and integrated into the platform (and for all of your data to sync properly).
Here are a few helpful links:
If you do want to get set up with Lifetimely, they offer 1-800-D2C community members a Friends Rate of 50% OFF your first three months on the platform. You can redeem that by filling out the quick form on their tool profile here.
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