Healthy mid-market ranges 20-30%. Below 15% = email under-leveraged.
At a glance
The fraction of total store revenue that Dotdigital claims credit for, computed as dotdigital_attributed_revenue / commerce_platform_total_revenue. The single most important Dotdigital health number for executives. It answers “is email pulling its weight in the marketing mix?”. The healthy band depends on the platform pairing: 5 to 15% on BigCommerce / Adobe Commerce (Dotdigital’s strongest integrations), 5 to 12% on Shopify (less native integration). Above 25% usually means non-email channels weakened, not that email got better.
| What it counts | dd_total_revenue / (bc_total_revenue OR ac_total_revenue OR shopify_total_revenue), joined on the same time window. Both numerator and denominator pulled fresh; the share is computed at card-render time. |
| Healthy band | 5 to 15% for established UK and EU B2C brands on BigCommerce or Magento. Lower band reflects (a) Dotdigital’s lighter automation depth vs Klaviyo, (b) GDPR-driven smaller consented lists, (c) UK and EU customer behaviour being less email-driven than US. Klaviyo on Shopify will run 8 to 25% on the same merchant, the gap is structural, not a Dotdigital weakness. |
| Why “below 15%” fires the alert | Below 15% the alert fires as a yellow flag, not a red one. The right read is “email is underleveraged”; the most common cause is missing or paused programmes. Pair with Programme vs Campaign Revenue Mix to see whether the gap is automation depth or campaign frequency. |
| Why above 25% should also be reviewed | High share is rarely a “win”; it’s usually a sign that paid, organic, or social channels are weak. The brand should investigate what happened to the other channels before celebrating. The exception: small brands at 30%+ where the list is small and email is genuinely the dominant channel. |
| Attribution truth | Dotdigital uses 7-day click + 1-day view; the commerce platform uses last-click or session-based. The two attribution models will never match exactly. Dotdigital will always claim more than the commerce platform’s “Email” channel breakdown, by 1.5 to 2x typically. The share computed here is “Dotdigital’s view of email vs total”; it is not “email’s incremental contribution”. |
| Currency | Both sides converted to a single currency at card-load time; multi-currency stores see a normalised share. |
| Refunds | Neither side deducts refunds. The share is gross-of-refund. For a net view, both sides have to subtract from their own refund tracking. |
| Time window | 30D vsP |
| Alert trigger | <15% (under-leveraged) |
| 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 homewares brand on BigCommerce running Dotdigital. 30D window: 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26.| Source | 30D revenue | Share |
|---|---|---|
| BigCommerce Total Revenue (commerce headline) | £1,820,000 | 100.0% |
| Dotdigital-attributed revenue | £146,500 | 8.05% |
| Google Ads-attributed revenue (separate connector) | £312,000 | 17.1% |
| Organic search-attributed (GA4) | £498,000 | 27.4% |
| Direct / unattributed | £604,000 | 33.2% |
| Other (social, referral, etc.) | £259,500 | 14.3% |
| Sum of channel attribution | £1,820,000 | 100.0% |
- 8.05% Dotdigital share is mid-band healthy for this brand size and platform combination. Comparable Klaviyo+Shopify brands typically hit 12 to 18%; the gap is structural and represents Dotdigital’s integration depth vs Klaviyo’s, plus the brand’s UK GDPR-shaped list (smaller, more consent-fresh than equivalent US lists).
- Email is the third-largest paid channel behind organic search and direct. This is healthy; over-reliance on email is itself a risk (a single deliverability event could swing 8% of monthly revenue).
- The brand ran a 24 Apr 26 bank-holiday campaign that contributed £61,500 to the Dotdigital number. Without that single tentpole, share would have been 4.7%, which would have triggered the under-leveraged alert. Tentpoles drive most of the email channel’s monthly variance.
- If the Dotdigital share were 22% with the same total, the brand should investigate paid channels first. A common trap: a brand sees Dotdigital share rise from 8% to 22% over 6 months and celebrates the email team’s work, when actually paid social ROAS halved and organic dropped due to a Google algorithm update; email looked better only because everything else got worse.
- The 7-day click attribution makes Dotdigital’s claim wider than GA4’s “Email” channel would show. GA4 uses last-non-direct-click and would attribute roughly £85,000 to email for the same period, vs Dotdigital’s £146,500. Both are “right” from their own model’s perspective; treat them as bounds (low: GA4, high: Dotdigital) and triangulate.
- 8 to 12%: business-as-usual, watch for trend
- 12 to 18%: email punching above weight, likely benefiting from a tentpole or programme upgrade
- Below 6%: investigate programme status, especially abandoned-cart, immediately
- Above 22%: investigate non-email channel health; the share is high because elsewhere weakened
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Email Share of Total Store Revenue |
|---|---|
| Dotdigital Email-Attributed Revenue | The numerator. The share is meaningless without absolute value context. |
| BigCommerce Total Revenue | The most common denominator pairing. |
| Adobe Commerce Total Revenue | The other common denominator. Dotdigital’s strongest commerce integration. |
| Programme vs Campaign Revenue Mix | When share is low, this card surfaces whether the gap is automation or campaign volume. |
| Active Programmes | The supply side of programmes. A drop in active programmes drops share by 2 to 5 percentage points. |
| Klaviyo Email Attributed Revenue Share | The Klaviyo equivalent. The 8 to 25% Klaviyo healthy band vs 5 to 15% Dotdigital is the structural platform difference. |
| GA4 Email Channel Revenue | The GA4 view. Always lower than Dotdigital’s claim because GA4 uses last-non-direct-click. |
| Google Ads Revenue Share | The competing-channel view. Use both to build the channel-mix picture. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Dotdigital: This share metric does not exist natively in Dotdigital. The closest equivalent: in r1-app.dotdigital.com → Insights → Performance Overview take the Total Revenue figure and divide manually by the brand’s commerce-platform headline. That’s what Vortex IQ does automatically. Where to look in BigCommerce / Adobe Commerce: The denominator for this share comes from the commerce platform’s own analytics. In BigCommerce, that’s the Orders → Insights total revenue. In Adobe Commerce, it’s Reports → Sales → Orders. The Vortex IQ denominator pulls from the same source as thebc_total_revenue or ac_total_revenue card.
Why our number may legitimately differ from the brand’s manual calculation:
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
| Time-zone. Dotdigital runs account locale; BigCommerce runs store timezone; Vortex IQ runs UTC. Three different boundary days. | ±0.3 to 0.8 percentage points at the boundary |
| Refund handling. Both Dotdigital revenue and BC revenue are gross-of-refund on this card. Brands computing manually often subtract refunds from one side but not the other, producing a mismatched share. | Manual calculations often understate by 1 to 2% |
| Currency normalisation. Multi-currency stores see different normalisation snapshots between Dotdigital (account base currency) and the commerce platform (store base currency). For UK-only stores both are GBP; for multi-region stores the FX differs slightly. | ±0.2 percentage points |
| Conversion-window setting. Dotdigital’s 7-day click window catches revenue 7 days after the campaign send; the commerce platform’s revenue is bucketed by order date. At the start of any window Dotdigital revenue is artificially low (its 7-day claim hasn’t accumulated). | Vortex IQ slightly low at window start, recovers by day 7 |
| Pair | Identity | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
dd_total_revenue / bc_total_revenue | This card’s value | Time-zone offset, conversion-window settling, FX |
dd_total_revenue / ac_total_revenue | Same shape on Adobe Commerce | Same |
dd_total_revenue / shopify_total_revenue | Same shape on Shopify | Same; Dotdigital-Shopify integration is less mature, share runs 2 to 4 percentage points lower |
| Compare to GA4 “Email” channel ÷ “Total” | Always lower (GA4 uses last-non-direct-click) | GA4 is conservative; Dotdigital is generous; truth is in between |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is the Dotdigital benchmark lower than Klaviyo’s? Three structural reasons. (1) Klaviyo’s automation library is richer out-of-the-box, especially for Shopify; Dotdigital’s strength is enterprise sending infrastructure not lifecycle automation breadth. (2) Klaviyo’s product-recommendation and predictive-LTV blocks ship by default; Dotdigital requires the Insights add-on. (3) Dotdigital is concentrated on UK and EU brands where GDPR consent rules produce smaller sendable lists than US-equivalents. The 5 to 15% Dotdigital band vs 8 to 25% Klaviyo band is real and consistent. My share is 4%. What do I do first? Build programmes. The fastest lever from sub-10% share to 12 to 15% is activating the standard four programmes: Welcome, Abandoned Cart, Browse Abandon, Post-Purchase. Each adds 1 to 4 percentage points to share within 60 days of going live. Start with Welcome and Abandoned Cart; they are the highest-leverage of the four. My share jumped from 8% to 22% last month, did email get better? Probably not. Check the denominator first; if BigCommerce revenue dropped (paid channels weakened, organic dipped, supply-chain issue) the share will rise even if email revenue is flat. Open BigCommerce Total Revenue and Google Ads Revenue Share in the same window. If both dropped, email’s share rose because everything else fell, not because email improved. What’s the right ratio of Dotdigital share to GA4 email channel share? Typically Dotdigital claims 1.5 to 2x what GA4 attributes. So if GA4 says 5% email, Dotdigital might say 9%. Both are right from their own model. The gap widens when your UTM hygiene is poor (more orders that should have been attributed to email lose the credit in GA4); the gap narrows when UTMs are clean and consistent. Should I include SMS revenue in this share? Yes if you’re using Dotdigital for SMS too. Dotdigital’sorderValue aggregates email and SMS programme/campaign revenue together; this card uses the aggregate. If the brand wants email-only share, they need to filter to email-channel sends only in Dotdigital’s Insights, which is a custom report.
Does this share count refunds against email or against total?
Neither, on this card. Both numerator and denominator are gross-of-refund. Refunds run roughly 5 to 8% across both sides for B2C brands, so they cancel out and the share is roughly correct. For a net-of-refund share, both cards would need to subtract refunds, which Vortex IQ doesn’t do today.
My multi-region brand has separate Dotdigital accounts per market. How does this card aggregate?
It doesn’t. The card pairs one Dotdigital connector to one commerce-platform connector. Multi-region brands need one share card per market and aggregate manually. Raise this with the Vortex IQ team if cross-region aggregation is needed.
Is 25% high or low for a small brand?
For a brand under £500k annual revenue, 25 to 35% is normal because the brand has a small loyal-list, paid acquisition is modest, and email is genuinely the dominant channel. As the brand grows past £2m annual, the share typically settles to 12 to 18% as paid acquisition scales. Don’t read the same alert thresholds across all brand sizes.
My alert is firing at “<15%” but I’m comfortable at 12%, can I mute it?
Yes, the alert thresholds are configurable per account. The default is conservative because most brands at sub-15% share are underleveraged on programmes. If the brand has done the programme work and is running 12% on a healthy stable mix, it’s fine. Adjust the threshold to “<8%” in your account settings.