ltv_mirage_detector.txt

# LTV MIRAGE DETECTOR
campaigns that look like winners on Monday and quietly disappoint by month-end.

Objective: Catch the campaigns that look like winners on Monday and quietly disappoint by month-end — cohorts that beat early ROAS targets but are already going quiet in the mid-game economy, signaling saturation before churn ever hits the revenue line.

## Core Insight (read this first)

Early ROAS measures acquisition — how well your creative converted a wallet in the first few sessions. It says almost nothing about retention or mid-game health. A cohort can front-load spend beautifully, then hit a content wall and flatline. The tell isn’t in the revenue curve; it’s upstream, in how fast players burn currency on core progression.

## Data Dependencies

-Acquisition side (MMP / attribution): campaign_roas_daily, attribution_cohorts — spend, installs, early ROAS by campaign cohort.
-Economy side (game telemetry): virtual_currency_sinks, player_progression_state — gems/resources spent on core-loop upgrades.

## Operational Logic & Execution Steps

Run daily against active campaigns scaling past a meaningful spend floor.

### 1. The ROAS check (the false positive)

Flag any campaign cohort where Day-7 ROAS beats its target by more than ~15%. This is the “looks great, scale it” signal you’re about to distrust.

### 2. The cohort link (harder than it sounds)

Tie the flagged campaign back to its in-game footprint. Reality check — device-graph loss and ATT/SKAN gaps mean most teams can only stitch reliably at the cohort / install-week level, not per player. This is exactly what “cross-environment connectivity” has to earn; don’t model it as a one-line join.

### 3. The saturation check (the economy drop)

Compute the cohort’s Day-14 sink velocity — daily currency spent on core progression — and compare it to your rolling 30-day organic baseline.

### 4. The trigger condition

If [D7 ROAS up > 15%] AND [D14 sink velocity down > 10% vs. organic] → raise the flag. Thresholds are starting points; tune to your title’s variance and require enough cohort size to be significant, or you’re just chasing noise.

IF   D7 ROAS            > target + 15%
AND  D14 sink velocity  < organic - 10%
---------------------------------------
THEN raise the flag

## Caveats (don’t skip these)

-Lower spending ≠ bad. It can mean saturation, a content wall, or genuinely satisfied players. The trigger is a prompt to investigate, not a verdict.
-Correlation isn’t causation — the alert points you at a cohort to look at, it doesn’t diagnose the cause.
-Run it daily against active campaigns scaling past a meaningful spend floor.

## Automated Output (the dream state)

-Diagnostic view: Overlay the cohort’s ad-spend curve against its currency-sink depletion so the divergence is visible at a glance.
-Nudge, not verdict: Surface it the next morning where decisions get made — LTV Mirage watch: Campaign [X] is beating Day-7 ROAS by ~18%, but mid-game sink velocity is down ~12% vs. organic. Early money, quiet economy — worth a look before we scale further.

> The metric that makes you feel best on Monday is often the one worth trusting least. Read the economy, not just the ledger.