Klaviyo attribution: is Klaviyo taking credit for sales your ads drove?

How does Klaviyo attribution work?

Klaviyo's help center describes it as a combination of a "last touch" model and each channel's attribution window. When someone places an order, Klaviyo looks for the most recent Klaviyo message they opened or clicked. If the order falls inside that message's window, the message gets the credit.

The defaults, per Klaviyo's help center:

• Email and SMS: a 5-day window for accounts created after Oct 9, 2024. Older accounts may be set differently, so check yours.
• Push: 24 hours.
• Opens and clicks both count. New accounts get a 5-day window for email clicks and a 5-day window for email opens.
• Apple Privacy opens count by default. Conversions are tracked even if Apple Mail Privacy Protection opened the email automatically.

You can change all of this under Settings, then Attribution. Windows can go up to 90 days or 720 hours. Changes apply to your data historically and can take up to 36 hours to show.

This is also why I run SMS in Klaviyo instead of a separate tool. It keeps email and SMS in the same house, under one set of attribution rules, so there's less confusion about which channel gets credit for an order.

Is Klaviyo inflating my email revenue?

Here's the honest version.

Say a customer gets your Tuesday newsletter. Apple Mail opens it automatically when her phone is on the charger. She never looks at it. On Thursday she sees your Meta ad, clicks, and buys. (A made-up example, just to show how it works.)

With default settings, that order can be credited to your Tuesday newsletter, because an open happened inside the 5-day window. Meta may count the same order in its own report, using its own rules. Shopify records one order. Add up what every channel claims, and you'll often get more than your actual revenue.

That's the inflation founders worry about, and it's real. In my data across 4 consumable brands, Apple auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments. Those are mostly machines, not people, and by default they can earn attribution.

But it's not all inflation. Klaviyo can also miss sales email did drive, like someone who read your email and bought a week later, outside the window. Attribution is a set of rules, not a measurement of truth. It's useful as long as you know the rules.

Why attributed isn't the same as incremental

Attributed revenue means an email touched the sale within the window. Incremental revenue means the sale wouldn't have happened without the email.

Some emails are highly incremental. An abandoned checkout email that brings back someone who'd left is doing real work. Others mostly ride along. A newsletter sent to your most loyal customers the same week they'd reorder anyway will collect credit for orders that were coming regardless.

You can't see the difference in the Klaviyo dashboard. You can only see it with a test: hold back a random group from an email or flow, and compare how much each group buys. I walk through how to do that in email incrementality testing.

This matters most if you pay anyone based on email revenue. If you're weighing a performance-based email marketing agency, agree on the attribution settings before you sign.

How I read Klaviyo attribution

I don't throw the attributed numbers out. I just don't read them alone. Here's what I look at.

Clicks before opens. A click is a person deciding to tap. An open can be a phone on a charger. In my data across 4 brands, open rate tracked revenue at just 0.32, while click rate tracked it at 0.65. For one brand, more opens actually meant less money. More in open rate vs click rate.

Revenue per recipient. Email revenue divided by the people who got it. It's still attributed, but it puts emails on the same scale, so you can see which ones carry the account. See revenue per recipient.

Shopify's total. I compare what Klaviyo claims against total store revenue from Shopify, month over month. If Klaviyo's share jumps while nothing changed in email, something in attribution or tracking is off.

Revenue with no clicks. Across my portfolio, about 20 sends showed opens and revenue but zero clicks. That meant tracking was broken. If an email shows revenue and zero clicks, check tracking before you trust anything.

Flows vs campaigns. Flows fire on behavior, like a cart left behind, so they tend to be closer to cause and effect. Big campaigns to your whole list are where ride-along credit piles up.

How to make your Klaviyo attribution more honest

You can tighten things in a few minutes. Here's where I'd start.

1. Exclude Apple Privacy opens from attribution. Klaviyo's settings let you do this. It removes them from attribution, though not from your open-rate reporting.
2. Don't make the open window longer than the click window. Klaviyo's own help center warns that a longer open window than click window may bias attribution toward opens.
3. Consider a shorter open window. Clicks show intent. Opens, especially now, are weaker evidence. A shorter open window means fewer ride-along credits.
4. Leave bot clicks excluded. Klaviyo excludes email and text bot clicks by default for new accounts. Check that yours is set that way.
5. Write down what you changed and when. Changes apply historically, so your past numbers will shift. Note the date so nobody thinks email suddenly got worse.

Your Klaviyo revenue will probably go down after this. That's fine. A smaller number you can trust beats a bigger one you can't.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so treat it as directional. The tracking finding comes from sends across the brands I work with.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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