Placed-order revenue attributed to Dotdigital sends. The hero number.
At a glance
Placed-order revenue Dotdigital claims credit for via its Insights / Engagement Cloud conversion-tracking pixel. The headline number for the email channel. Dotdigital-attributed revenue is always a SUBSET of total store revenue, typically 5 to 15% of the commerce platform headline for established UK and EU B2C brands. The lower band vs Klaviyo (8 to 25%) reflects Dotdigital’s lighter automation depth, longer enterprise sending cadence, and a stricter GDPR-driven consented-list shape.
| What it counts | SUM(orderValue) across every campaign and triggered programme whose conversion window overlaps the selected period. Dotdigital aggregates this server-side via the Insights data warehouse, exposed on the /v2/campaigns/{id}/summary and /v2/programmes/{id}/summary REST endpoints. |
| Definition of “sent” | Delivered. Dotdigital reports numUniqueOpens / numUniqueClicks / orderValue against numUniqueRecipients after subtracting hard bounces and global suppressions. Per-recipient ratios on this card therefore use the post-bounce denominator. |
| Attribution model | Default 7-day click + 1-day view. Note this is broader than Klaviyo’s 5-day click default. A click on a Dotdigital email or SMS that converts within 7 days, or a view (Insights pixel pre-fetch) within 1 day, is credited to the campaign or programme. The window is configurable in Account Settings → Insights → Conversion Window. |
| Multi-touch attribution | Last-touch within window. If a contact engages with two campaigns plus a triggered programme step before placing an order, only the most recent touch gets credit. Total Dotdigital revenue is NOT additive across overlapping sends, the same order can only count once. |
| Cross-channel attribution | Dotdigital only sees its own touches. A contact who came back via paid Google Ads or organic search is attributed to email if the Dotdigital touch was within 7 days. This is normal across all email platforms but matters when reconciling against GA4, where the email channel will look noticeably smaller. |
| Open rate basis | Unique opens (Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates this since 21 Sep 21; click rate is the resilient signal). |
| Bounce handling | Hard bounces auto-suppressed; soft bounces retried up to 5 times then suppressed. Both excluded from the delivered denominator. |
| Currency | Account base currency (set in Account Settings → Locale). Multi-currency BigCommerce or Magento stores see all orderValue normalised to the base currency at order-time FX, no FX gap on the Dotdigital side. |
| Refunds / cancellations | NOT deducted. The conversion event fires at order-creation; refunds are tracked separately on the numRefundedOrders field but do not subtract from orderValue. |
| GDPR scope | UK and EU contacts are “consent-required” by default; Dotdigital will not send to a contact whose consent has lapsed, so revenue from re-engagement campaigns is structurally smaller than US-based peers running on Klaviyo or Mailchimp. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (default 30D vs the prior 30D) |
| Alert trigger | drop >15% WoW, drives sentiment_key: total_revenue |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Dotdigital data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK-based mid-market homewares brand running on BigCommerce with Dotdigital Engagement Cloud for email plus SMS. Active list is 218,000 consented contacts, 84% UK, 12% EU, 4% rest-of-world. The 30-day window covers 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26. Conversion window is left at the Dotdigital default of 7-day click + 1-day view.| Source | Type | Sends | Recipients (post-bounce) | Dotdigital-attributed revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spring catalogue launch | Campaign | 1 | 198,400 | £42,800 |
| Bank-holiday weekend promo | Campaign | 3 | 196,200 | £61,500 |
| Welcome programme (4-step) | Programme | rolling | 3,800 entries | £8,200 |
| Abandoned-cart programme (3-step) | Programme | rolling | 6,400 entries | £21,600 |
| Browse-abandon programme | Programme | rolling | 4,100 entries | £4,400 |
| Post-purchase replenishment | Programme | rolling | 2,800 entries | £5,800 |
| Win-back at 90D inactive | Programme | rolling | 1,900 entries | £2,200 |
| Total Dotdigital revenue (this card) | £146,500 |
- Dotdigital claims £146,500 of email-attributed revenue. The same window’s BigCommerce headline was £1,820,000. Dotdigital accounts for 8.05% of total store revenue, well inside the 5 to 15% healthy band for UK B2C brands. A US peer on Klaviyo would typically run 12 to 18% on the same list shape because Klaviyo’s automation library and product-feed-driven recommendations are deeper.
- Programmes are 28% of revenue from a fraction of the volume. The five programmes generated £42,200 against 19,000 entries; the four campaigns generated £104,300 against ~590,000 sends. Per-recipient programmes are 6 to 8x more efficient than campaigns. The first lever for a low Dotdigital share is always “build the programmes”, not “send more campaigns”.
- The bank-holiday weekend campaign was the single biggest revenue event. £61,500 from three sends across 04 May 26 to 06 May 26. Dotdigital’s strongest pattern is concentrated UK-calendar moments (bank holidays, BFCM, Boxing Day) where the consented list is primed for promotional content; high-frequency 5x-per-week sending typically degrades open rate without lifting revenue.
- Abandoned-cart programme is over-represented. £21,600 from 6,400 entries means a Revenue per Entry of £3.38 for a programme that costs the brand nothing but copy maintenance. Compare against the Welcome programme at £2.16 per entry, the abandoned-cart audience has stronger purchase intent and the 7-day click window catches almost all of the recovery activity.
- Last-touch attribution may be over-claiming for the bank-holiday campaign. Some of the £61,500 had a Google Shopping click first that Dotdigital cannot see. Treat email-attributed revenue as a directional signal of channel health, not a clean incremental measure. Pair this card with Email Share of Total Store Revenue for the trended share.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Email-Attributed Revenue |
|---|---|
| Dotdigital Revenue per Recipient | The efficiency view: revenue divided by post-bounce recipients. Tells you whether you’re sending more or sending better. |
| Dotdigital Revenue per Send | The send-level efficiency view, useful for comparing campaign performance after the fact. |
| Dotdigital Conversion Rate | What share of recipients placed an order. Useful when revenue is up but you suspect bigger basket sizes are doing the work. |
| Dotdigital Click Rate | More resistant to MPP than open rate. The strongest leading indicator for revenue swings. |
| Programme vs Campaign Revenue Mix | Splits this card into “always-on” programme revenue vs “burst” campaign revenue. Healthy brands lean above 40% programme share. |
| Dotdigital Placed Orders Total | The order-count denominator. AOV equals this card divided by placed orders. |
| Email Share of Total Store Revenue | This card divided by commerce-platform total revenue. The single most important Dotdigital health number for executives. |
| BigCommerce Total Revenue | The denominator for the share calculation. See the Reconciling section below. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Dotdigital: r1-app.dotdigital.com → Insights → Performance Overview for the headline number. Dotdigital’s own dashboard breaks revenue down by Campaigns and Programmes (Dotdigital’s term for what Klaviyo calls “Flows”); this card sums both. The figures should match Vortex IQ to within a few pounds. Other Dotdigital views that look like this number but aren’t:- Campaigns → Reports → Campaign Summary: per-campaign only; this card sums across all of them plus all programmes.
- Programmes → Reports → Programme Summary: per-programme only.
- Insights → Custom Reports: can be configured to show this exact metric, but the default Insights cards differ.
- Engagement Cloud Classic UI (legacy at app-eu.dotdigital.com): older customers may still be on this. The numbers reconcile but the URL paths differ.
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
Region pod. Dotdigital runs on regional pods (r1 UK, r2 US, r3 AU). Vortex IQ talks to the pod the connector is configured against; if the merchant has accounts on multiple pods, only the connected pod is counted. | Vortex IQ lower if a second pod exists |
| Time-zone. Dotdigital reports run on the account locale (typically Europe/London for UK accounts); Vortex IQ runs on UTC by default. Boundary days will differ for accounts outside UTC. | ±1 day’s revenue at the boundary |
| Conversion-window setting. Vortex IQ uses the account’s current setting. If the merchant changed the window mid-period (e.g. from 5d to 7d), historical numbers may differ between Dotdigital’s snapshot and Vortex IQ’s live read. | Small drift on changed-window accounts |
| Insights pixel deployment. If the conversion pixel is missing on a checkout success page (a common BigCommerce or Magento theme regression), some orders never enter Dotdigital’s attribution at all. Vortex IQ reads what Dotdigital sees, so the gap appears as “low share” rather than a reconciliation diff. | Both Dotdigital and Vortex IQ low; commerce platform unaffected |
Currency. Dotdigital stores orderValue in account base currency; multi-currency stores see all orders normalised at order-time FX. | None; consistent |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
bigcommerce.bc_total_revenue | Dotdigital ≤ 5 to 15% of BigCommerce Total Revenue | Dotdigital only sees revenue where the contact’s last meaningful touch (within 7 days of click or 1 day of view) was a Dotdigital send. Other revenue came from organic, paid, social, direct, or referral. Email share above 25% usually means non-Dotdigital channels weakened, NOT that email got better. |
adobe_commerce.ac_total_revenue | Dotdigital ≤ 5 to 15% of Adobe Commerce Total Revenue | Same shape. Dotdigital is the most common email partner for Adobe Commerce / Magento; the integration uses the Dotdigital for Magento extension which writes orders directly into Insights. |
shopify.total_revenue | Dotdigital ≤ 5 to 12% of Shopify Total Revenue | Slightly lower band than BC or Magento because Dotdigital’s Shopify integration is less native than Klaviyo’s; product-recommendation blocks and Shopify-event triggers are weaker. |
ga4.ga_revenue_trend | Dotdigital ≈ GA4’s email channel revenue × (1 + last-touch over-claim) | GA4 typically uses last non-direct click; Dotdigital claims credit on any click within 7 days OR view within 1 day. Dotdigital will always claim more than GA4’s email channel; a 30 to 50% gap is normal. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is my Dotdigital share lower than my US peers report on Klaviyo? Two structural reasons. First, GDPR. UK and EU consent rules mean Dotdigital lists are smaller than US-equivalent Klaviyo lists for the same brand size, because the consent re-confirmation process culls the file roughly every 18 months. Second, automation depth. Klaviyo’s product-recommendation and predictive-LTV blocks are richer than Dotdigital’s; Dotdigital is stronger on enterprise-grade sending infrastructure and SMS, weaker on out-of-the-box ecommerce automation. A 5 to 15% Dotdigital share is healthy; a 12 to 18% Klaviyo share is healthy on the same store. Don’t compare the two numbers directly. Why is Dotdigital claiming so much revenue, surely my other marketing matters too? Dotdigital’s last-touch attribution gives email full credit for any conversion within 7 days of a click. If a customer clicked a Google Ad, then clicked a Dotdigital email five days later, then placed an order, Dotdigital claims it. All email platforms work this way, it isn’t Dotdigital being aggressive (Klaviyo’s 5-day window is actually narrower). The right way to read this card is “what fraction of conversions had email touches at the bottom of the funnel”, not “what would have been lost without email”. My Dotdigital number went up 30% but BigCommerce Total Revenue is flat. What’s going on? Two common causes. First, you ran a tentpole UK-calendar campaign (bank holiday, Christmas, Boxing Day, BFCM) that captured customers who would have purchased anyway, just attributing them to email instead of organic. Second, you may have changed the conversion window in Account Settings → Insights. Both are legitimate but the first is “vanity attribution” and shouldn’t drive marketing-budget decisions. Does this card include SMS revenue? Yes, both email and SMS Engagement Cloud sends are pulled from the same/v2/campaigns/{id}/summary endpoint. The Dotdigital API does not separate them at the aggregate revenue level. To see SMS isolated, filter by channel = sms in Insights → Custom Reports on the Dotdigital side.
Why doesn’t this match my BigCommerce “Email” channel revenue under Marketing Reports?
BigCommerce Analytics uses its own session-based attribution model with its own UTM hygiene rules. Dotdigital uses its Insights pixel and a 7-day click window. They will never match exactly. Use one or the other consistently for trend tracking, don’t mix and match across reports.
Refunds, what happens to email-attributed revenue when an order is refunded?
Dotdigital’s orderValue does NOT subtract refunds. The conversion event still counts. Dotdigital tracks numRefundedOrders separately under the same campaign or programme summary, but it does not net off this card. For a net view, subtract Dotdigital’s Refunded Order Value card (when added to the registry).
My contacts unsubscribed after I uploaded my CSV list, why is revenue lower than expected?
Dotdigital is GDPR-strict. Uploading a list with old or unverified consent often triggers a soft-suppression sweep where Dotdigital re-validates each contact through a re-permissioning email; non-responders are auto-suppressed. The sending list shrinks by 20 to 40% on first upload. This is the platform doing its job. Run Active Subscribers Estimate before and after uploads to see the real reachable base.
What’s the difference between revenue from a Campaign vs a Programme on this card?
None at the headline level, this card sums both. The distinction matters for efficiency, not totals. Use Programme vs Campaign Revenue Mix for the split: programmes are typically 6 to 8x more efficient per recipient because they’re triggered by behaviour, not blasted to a list.
Why didn’t a recent campaign show up?
Two cases. First, the campaign hasn’t completed its conversion window yet (7-day click window means revenue from a campaign sent yesterday will continue accruing for the next 6 days). Second, Dotdigital’s Insights data warehouse refreshes every 15 to 30 minutes; very-recent sends may lag the live commerce platform feed by up to half an hour.