How do I fix Klaviyo email marketing attribution for subscription renewal revenue?

Hi! The cleanest fix is to stop letting “opens” drive revenue attribution and instead measure email-driven revenue from clicks only, with a shorter lookback window—then report subscription renewals separately (so your renewal charges don’t get counted as incremental email marketing revenue just because someone opened something recently).

Here’s a practical setup that works well for subscription businesses:

1) Change Klaviyo attribution to “clicks” (not opens)

Opens are noisy (privacy features + “I glanced at it” behavior), and they’re exactly what causes unrelated renewals to get credited.

In Klaviyo, go to Settings → Attribution and:

• Turn off Email Opens for attribution (leave Email Clicks on).
• Shorten the email click window to something that matches buying intent for your store (many subscription brands use a much shorter window than the default; the right number depends on your sales cycle).
• Enable options to exclude Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) opens from attribution (and exclude bot clicks if available), so machine activity doesn’t inflate results.

This one change usually removes the biggest “renewal revenue inflation” immediately.

2) Separate “renewal revenue” reporting from “email-attributed revenue”

Even with click-only attribution, subscription renewals can still be counted if a customer clicked an email recently and then their renewal processed. The key is to stop using one blended revenue number for business decisions.

What to do instead:

• Create reports/dashboards for New/One-time revenue vs Subscription renewal revenue.
• In Klaviyo reporting, use filters on your order/renewal event properties (depends on your ecommerce/subscription platform) such as tags, “subscription” indicators, “order_type,” “origin,” “app,” etc. to exclude renewal orders from your “email marketing revenue” view.

If your platform sends renewals into Klaviyo as the same “Placed Order” event as normal purchases, you’ll need to rely on those event properties (or tags/line-item properties) to split them cleanly.

3) Track renewals as their own metric if possible (best-case)

If your subscription platform can send a distinct event (for example, something like “Subscription Renewal” / “Subscription Charged” separate from “Placed Order”), that’s ideal because you can:

• Keep “Placed Order” for standard ecommerce attribution
• Report “Subscription Charged” as operational retention revenue (not email-attributed), or treat it with a different measurement model

If you’re not sure whether you have a distinct renewal event available, check a few renewal profiles in Klaviyo and look at the exact metric name(s) firing when a renewal happens.

4) Use email “influence” for renewals instead of direct attribution (optional, but more honest)

For subscription businesses, renewals are often better measured as influenced retention rather than last-touch revenue. A common approach is:

• Attribute email revenue (for decision-making) based on clicks and non-renewal purchases
• Measure renewal uplift using holdouts/control groups in flows where possible (e.g., renewal reminder vs no reminder), or compare cohorts

That keeps your deliverability/engagement work from getting “rewarded” with revenue that would’ve arrived anyway.

If you tell me what platform you’re using for subscriptions (Shopify Subscriptions, Recharge, Stripe, etc.) and what metric your renewals appear under in Klaviyo (usually “Placed Order,” but not always), I can suggest the exact event/property filters to separate renewals from one-time purchases in your Klaviyo reports.