The Ecomm Analyst

Klaviyo’s revenue numbers are too high. So are Meta’s. So are Google’s. None of them are lying, but all of them are claiming the same orders.

If you’ve ever wondered why your channels add up to more than 100% of revenue, this is why. Each platform claims credit for any conversion it can plausibly touch. Klaviyo will count any order from a subscriber who opened or clicked within the attribution window, even if that person was going to buy anyway because they saw an Instagram ad three hours earlier and remembered they wanted the new colorway.

I’m not dunking on Klaviyo. The reports are useful for what they are. The trap is treating “Klaviyo revenue” as a clean answer to “what is email worth?”

A more useful question, in my experience. What does email do that wasn’t going to happen anyway?

A few practical ways to get closer to that answer.

Look at flow revenue separately from campaign revenue. Flow revenue (welcome series, browse abandonment, post-purchase) is usually closer to incremental because it’s triggering behavior. Campaign revenue (newsletters, promo blasts) is much more contested. Someone on your list who buys after a 20% off email might have bought anyway when the sale hit Instagram.

Run holdouts on engaged segments. I’ll pull a randomly selected 5-10% of an engaged segment that gets no campaign for a defined window. The lift over that group is closer to true email contribution than the headline Klaviyo number.

Cross-check against an attribution platform applying consistent rules. I use ThoughtMetric here because it grades email by the same logic as paid social, search, and affiliate. If Klaviyo says a flow drove $40K and ThoughtMetric data-driven says $22K, the truth is somewhere in there. That’s a much more useful range than either number alone.

The honest answer for most stores. Email is doing real work, just less than the dashboard suggests. The good news is that flows are usually doing more of the heavy lifting than people think, and campaigns less. Knowing which is which changes how you spend your build hours.