Square Orders to Email Attribution, broken down by row.
At a glance
A cross-channel revenue-at-risk audit. It takes Square Orders revenue and cross-references each order’s customer against your email platform (Klaviyo, Dotdigital, Mailchimp, or similar) to estimate how much of that revenue your email programme is influencing, and crucially how much is going unattributed despite an active, paying email audience. A large unattributed share while you run regular campaigns points to broken matching, missing capture, or an underperforming programme.
| What it counts | Square Orders revenue in the window, split by whether the order’s customer is matched to an engaged contact in your email platform (attributed) or not (unattributed). Reported per row (per channel or per segment). |
| Channel / source treatment | Cross-channel by definition. It joins Square Orders (revenue, customer email_address) to your email platform’s contact and engagement data. Meaningless without an email connector configured. |
| How orders are matched | On the customer email_address attached to the order, against subscribed, engaged contacts in the email platform. Guest orders and POS orders with no email captured cannot be attributed. |
| Currency / unit | Currency (the order total, total_money.amount, in the location’s currency). The headline is the attributed vs unattributed split of Square revenue. |
| Time window | 30D (attribution assessed over the trailing 30 days). |
| Alert trigger | Fires when more than 30% of Square revenue is unattributed despite an active email programme. The split is shown per row so you can see where the gap sits. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
| Why it is revenue at risk | If most revenue is unattributed while you mail regularly, either your email programme is not actually driving sales (an efficiency problem) or your matching and capture are broken (a measurement problem). Both hide real money: wasted spend or unreached buyers. |
| What it is not | Last-click marketing attribution in the ad-platform sense. It is a coarse, owned-data estimate of email influence on Square revenue, designed to surface a broken or under-leveraged email channel, not to settle multi-touch credit. |
Calculation
Calculated automatically by cross-referencing your Square Online orders against your connected email platform. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US home fragrance brand on Square. One store plus a Square Online storefront, running weekly campaigns in Dotdigital. The 30-day window covers 14 Feb 26 to 15 Mar 26. Each row is a channel or segment.| Row (channel / segment) | Square revenue | Attributed to email | Unattributed | Unattributed % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Online (web) | $84,000 | $46,000 | $38,000 | 45% |
| Square POS (in-store) | $120,000 | $9,000 | $111,000 | 93% |
| Square Invoices (B2B) | $26,000 | $1,000 | $25,000 | 96% |
| All channels (this card) | $230,000 | $56,000 | $174,000 | 76% |
- POS revenue is almost entirely unattributed, and that is mostly a capture problem, not an efficiency one. In-store buyers who never gave an email cannot be matched, so 93% of POS revenue shows as unattributed. That is not your email programme failing; it is a capture gap at the register. Read it alongside Customer Capture Source (POS vs Online) before drawing conclusions.
- Read the web row in isolation for the true programme read. On Square Online, where email is captured at checkout, 45% is still unattributed. That is the number that actually tests your email programme. If you mail weekly and still less than half of web revenue is email-influenced, the levers are matching quality, segmentation, and campaign relevance.
- The blended 76% crosses the alert, but the alert is about active programmes. With weekly Dotdigital sends and 76% unattributed overall, the Nerve Centre alert fires. The instinct to panic at 76% is wrong though, strip out POS capture gaps first. Pair with High-Value Square Customers Unengaged on Email to see which spenders are slipping through.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Square Orders to Email Attribution |
|---|---|
| High-Value Square Customers Unengaged on Email | The customer-level view of the same gap. Unattributed revenue and unengaged high spenders are two reads on one problem. |
| Customer Capture Source (POS vs Online) | Explains how much of the unattributed revenue is simply POS orders with no email captured, separating capture gaps from programme weakness. |
| Email Opted-In Customers (Directory) | The reachable audience that should be driving attributed revenue. Low opt-in caps how much email can ever attribute. |
| Total Revenue (30d, all channels) | The denominator. This card splits that headline revenue by email influence. |
| Revenue by Channel (POS / Online / Invoices) | Attribution differs sharply by channel. The channel split clarifies why the blended number looks the way it does. |
dotdigital | The email-platform side of the join. Use it to confirm campaign sends, opens, clicks, and platform-reported revenue per campaign. |
Reconciling against Square
Where to look in the Square Dashboard: Square Dashboard, Reports, Sales summary. Set the same window and confirm total Square revenue, that is the denominator this card splits. Square also exposes a Marketing area with its own campaign reporting, but Square’s native marketing reporting only covers Square Marketing campaigns, not your external email platform, so it cannot reproduce this cross-channel split. Other Square Dashboard views that look like the same number but aren’t:- Reports, Sales summary, Gross sales: confirms the total Square revenue this card divides. It does not split by email influence.
- Marketing, campaign reporting (Square Marketing): attributes revenue to Square’s own email tool only. If you use an external platform, this view misses it entirely.
- Customers, Insights: behavioural summaries, not revenue attribution.
- Reports, Payments: payment events, not orders, and no email dimension.
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
Email match on email_address. Orders with a typo’d, secondary, or missing email cannot be matched, so they fall into unattributed even if the customer is engaged elsewhere. | Vortex IQ may over-report unattributed until emails are cleaned |
| Guest and POS orders. Orders with no customer email captured are structurally unattributable. Square Dashboard total revenue includes them; this card puts them in unattributed. | Unattributed share rises with POS and guest mix |
| Attribution window. A purchase shortly after an email engagement counts as influenced; a purchase long after does not. Window choice shifts the split. | Split moves with the chosen window |
| Sync lag. Recent orders or email engagement may take a cycle to reach our index. | Self-resolves within minutes |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
dotdigital | The email platform’s own attributed revenue should be in the same ballpark as the attributed figure here | The two use different attribution models (platform last-click vs owned-data email match), so they will not match exactly. A large divergence points to matching or capture problems, not a bug. |
klaviyo | Same as above for Klaviyo-based merchants | Klaviyo attributes on click and order events within its own window. Treat it as a directional cross-check, not a reconciliation, since Square is the merchant of record for the revenue. |