Shopify Email is the default for a lot of smaller stores because it is already in the admin, it is cheap and it does the basics well. The reporting is where it gets tricky. Shopify shows you sales tied to each campaign and automation, and those numbers tend to be generous. They are not wrong exactly, but they answer a different question from the one you care about, which is how much revenue would not have happened without the email.
Here is how I measure it without tripping over the usual overlap problems.
What Shopify’s numbers actually show
Shopify ties sales to your email activities using its own marketing attribution, in the Marketing section of the admin. A customer who clicks an email and later buys can be credited to that email, even if they were also retargeted on Meta and came back through a branded search. Every one of those channels will claim the same order in its own reporting.
That overlap is normal, and it is not unique to Shopify Email. Klaviyo does the same thing, and I wrote about how Klaviyo frames it in what Klaviyo counts as email revenue. The fix is the same for both. Treat the platform number as an upper bound and look for a second view.
Make sure your links carry UTMs
Open a sent email and check the links. If they include UTM parameters, your analytics and attribution tools can see email as a source. If they do not, add them, and keep the naming consistent with your other channels so email lands in one bucket. A typical setup is source set to shopify_email, medium set to email, and campaign set to the campaign name.
Without UTMs, most of your email traffic shows up as direct. That makes email look weaker in your attribution tool than in Shopify, and it makes direct look like a channel you are doing something to earn. I laid out a naming structure in UTM parameter structure for Shopify, and the reasons direct traffic swells without it are in direct traffic and sales attribution.
Compare three numbers
Once tracking is clean, I look at three numbers for each campaign. The first is the revenue Shopify credits to the email. The second is the revenue an attribution tool credits to email under a multi-touch model, which spreads credit across the other touches in the journey. The third is the lift you see in total store revenue on send days compared with similar days without a send.
The first number is the most flattering. The second is usually a good deal lower, and the gap grows with how much paid traffic you run. The third is the closest to the truth and the noisiest, so I only trust it across several sends.
If you use an attribution tool, it should treat email as one touch among many. ThoughtMetric credits each order once across channels, so the email share is already net of what Meta, Google and search claimed for the same orders. (Disclosure: ThoughtMetric sponsors this site.) Any multi-touch tool with clean UTMs will give you a similar view.
Separate campaigns from automations
Welcome flows, abandoned cart emails and post-purchase sequences behave differently from campaigns. Automations reach people who already showed intent, so they earn a lot of credit for orders that were likely to happen anyway. Campaigns are a better test of whether email moves people who were not already shopping.
I judge automations on conversion rate and order speed compared with a short holdout if the volume allows it, and campaigns on send-day lift. Lumping them together makes your email program look like one strong channel when it is usually a strong safety net plus a weaker broadcast channel.
Watch returning customers
Shopify Email mostly reaches people already on your list, which means most of the revenue it gets credit for comes from returning customers. That is fine, but report it that way. If your email revenue looks great while your new customer count is falling, the email program is not hiding the problem, it is just not the right tool for it. The general version of this problem is in email revenue overcounting.
When to move off Shopify Email
Measurement alone is rarely the reason to switch platforms. Most brands move to a dedicated email tool for segmentation, flows and SMS. If you do switch, export your Shopify Email campaign history first and keep your UTM naming the same so the trend lines continue in your attribution tool.
How I set it up
- Check that every Shopify Email link carries UTM parameters, and match the naming to your other channels.
- Treat the revenue Shopify credits to email as a ceiling, not the real number.
- Compare it with a multi-touch view that credits each order once across channels.
- Look at send-day lift in total revenue across several campaigns before trusting any one result.
- Report automations and campaigns separately.
- Split email revenue into new and returning customers so it does not cover for weak acquisition.
Leave a Reply