Your Klaviyo Revenue Is Probably Wrong: What a 2 Day Click Only Window Did to a Perfume Brand

Quick answer: If your Klaviyo revenue dropped or jumped for no reason you can point to, check Settings, then Analytics, then Attribution before you touch anything else. A click only attribution window shorter than about 3 days can hide most of your real email revenue. The fix takes five minutes. Finding it can take a lot longer, and it can cost you a client’s trust if they find it before you do.

Key takeaways

• Klaviyo’s default attribution window is 5 days for opens and clicks. A window shorter than that is a deliberate setting, not a platform default, and someone made that choice at some point.
• A perfume brand we run Klaviyo for had its window set to click only, 2 days. That single setting hid most of a month’s real email revenue.
• The fix is not complicated. The hard part is that most people never check this setting until the revenue number stops making sense.
• We now put the attribution window on the same audit checklist as deliverability and flow coverage, because a broken number looks exactly like a broken flow from the outside.

What happened

In February 2026, a perfume brand we run Klaviyo for flagged a problem with their campaign reporting. One send in particular stood out: our dashboard showed 1,117 dollars in campaign revenue. Running the same send back through Klaviyo’s own default attribution settings put the number closer to 5,000 dollars. Same email, same list, same send time. Almost a 5x gap between what the account was reporting and what the platform’s own default model would have shown.

We pulled the full month to see if it was a one off. It was not. February closed at 4,622 dollars in attributed campaign revenue under the account’s actual settings. Under Klaviyo’s default model, the same month would have shown somewhere close to 18,000 dollars.

Nothing about the sends had changed. Same cadence, same offers, same list health. The only thing that had changed, at some point before we picked up the account, was a setting nobody had looked at since: the attribution window had been configured to click only, with a 2 day window.

I told the client directly, because there was no way around it:

“The 2 day window only shows part of the revenue, which means we’re optimizing campaigns using incomplete data.”

What a click only window actually measures

Klaviyo’s attribution window decides how long after someone opens or clicks an email their next purchase still gets credited to that email. Click only means opens are ignored entirely and only a click counts. A 2 day window means the click has to be followed by a purchase within 48 hours, or the sale gets attributed somewhere else instead, usually to whatever channel happened to touch the customer last.

That is a much tighter net than it sounds. A customer who clicks a Tuesday campaign, thinks about it over the weekend, and completes the purchase on Saturday gets counted as email revenue under a 5 day window and gets counted as nothing under a 2 day one. The purchase still happened. The email still drove it. The report just stopped being able to see it.

Click only attribution itself is not the problem. Removing open based attribution is usually the right call, because Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can register an email as opened even when nobody actually opened it, which inflates revenue in the other direction. The problem here was specifically the window length. Our own attribution guide recommends a click window of 3 days as the conservative setting and 5 days as the balanced one for most brands. This account was running tighter than even our most conservative recommendation, and nobody had flagged it because the account was not “broken” in any way a health check would normally catch. It was just quietly under reporting.

A 2 day click only window does not measure email. It measures impatience.

What we changed

We widened the window to the balanced setting, click attribution at 5 days, and reran the last full month against it so the client could see both numbers side by side rather than take our word for the difference. We also added attribution settings to the monthly account check we run for every client, alongside deliverability and flow coverage, so a setting like this cannot sit unnoticed for months again.

The bigger change was in how we report. Every report now states the attribution window it was pulled under, in plain language, at the top of the document. Not because the client is likely to ask. Because the next time a number looks wrong, the setting that produced it should be the first thing anyone can check, not the last.

If you want a second opinion on your own account, Klaviyo’s reporting dashboard is worth understanding properly before you trust anything it tells you, and Settings, then Analytics, then Attribution is the first place we check on every audit we run.

Want us to check yours? Get a free Klaviyo audit and we will tell you exactly what your account’s attribution settings are actually reporting, not what the dashboard assumes you already know.

Frequently asked questions

What is Klaviyo’s default attribution window?

Klaviyo’s default is 5 days for both email opens and email clicks. If someone opens or clicks an email and purchases within 5 days, that sale is credited to email. Most accounts never touch this setting, which is why it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Why does my Klaviyo revenue not match what I expected?

The most common cause is a custom attribution window that does not match Klaviyo’s default, usually set once during onboarding and never revisited. A window that is too narrow, especially a click only window under 3 days, can hide most of your real email revenue. A window that is too wide can do the opposite and over count it.

Should I use click only attribution in Klaviyo?

Click only attribution is a reasonable choice because it removes false positives from email opens, which Apple’s privacy features can trigger even when nobody actually opened the email. The setting itself is not the problem. The window length is. We do not recommend a click window shorter than 3 days.

How do I check my Klaviyo attribution settings?

In Klaviyo, go to Settings, then Analytics, then Attribution. You will see separate windows for email opened, email clicked, and SMS clicked. Compare what you find there against what your monthly reports assume, and you will usually spot the gap immediately.