Most Klaviyo accounts are tracking the wrong things. Not intentionally. The default dashboard shows you everything: open rates, click rates, list size, total attributed revenue. It all looks important, and because it is there, you optimize for it.

The problem is that some of those numbers are broken. Some are misleading. Some stopped meaning what you think they mean three years ago.

After working across dozens of e-commerce accounts, the pattern is consistent: the brands doing well in Klaviyo don't have bigger dashboards. They have smaller ones. Five or six metrics they trust completely, and nothing else.

Here's which numbers deserve a spot on that short list, and which ones you should stop treating as signals.

The Klaviyo metrics worth tracking

Revenue per recipient (RPR)

RPR is straightforward: total email revenue divided by total emails delivered. If you send 10,000 emails and generate $1,000, your RPR is $0.10.

This number captures the real health of your email program. Not how many people opened it, but how much each send is worth in dollars. You can calculate it campaign by campaign, flow by flow, or segment by segment.

Most marketers ignore RPR entirely. They look at total revenue, which rises automatically when you send more. RPR doesn't work like that. It punishes sends to unengaged contacts and rewards tight segmentation. If RPR stays flat while send volume climbs, you have a quality problem, not a volume problem.

If you only track one Klaviyo metric, this is the one. Everything else is commentary.

Flow revenue as a share of total revenue

Your automated sequences (welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back) should generate somewhere between 30% and 60% of your total email revenue. Below 25% means your automation is underperforming. Above 80% usually means you are not sending enough campaigns.

This ratio reframes the question from 'are we sending enough?' to 'is our automation doing its job?' Many accounts coast on campaigns and never push flow revenue past 15-20%. That is predictable, compounding revenue sitting on the table unused.

My recommendation: review this ratio monthly. If flows drop below 30%, audit your welcome series, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment sequences before touching anything else in the account.

Placed order rate by segment

Raw click rates don't tell you who's actually buying. Placed order rate by segment does. In Klaviyo custom reports, filter by segment and track the Placed Order metric over a 30, 60, or 90-day window.

The questions this answers: which segments convert? Are your VIPs still responding to campaigns or just passively browsing? Are at-risk customers buying again after a win-back flow? Are new subscribers purchasing within their first 30 days?

This is where Klaviyo segmentation earns its price. Most accounts barely scratch the surface of what custom reports can show them. What this means for you: once you know which segments actually convert, you can prioritize them in every campaign and flow decision going forward.

List growth rate, active subscribers only

Forget total list size. The number that matters is how many actively engaged subscribers you are adding each month. In Klaviyo, build a segment of profiles who have opened or clicked in the last 90 days, then track that segment's size month over month.

If this number is flat or declining, your acquisition is broken, regardless of what your overall list size looks like. You might be adding 2,000 new subscribers per month and losing 2,100 engaged ones. Net result: your list looks stable while its quality quietly erodes underneath.

Put it this way: 20,000 engaged subscribers will outperform 100,000 disengaged ones in revenue, deliverability, and every metric that actually matters.

Deliverability signals: delivery rate and spam complaint rate

These are your early warning system. Delivery rate should stay above 98%. Spam complaint rate should stay below 0.08%, which is the threshold Google and Yahoo enforced in 2024 for senders over 5,000 emails per day.

If either metric starts slipping, everything else on this list becomes secondary. You can have the best segmentation and the sharpest copy in your market, and none of it will matter if your emails stop reaching the inbox.

The pattern to follow: set up Klaviyo monitors on both metrics now, so you get notified before there is a deliverability problem, not after your sending domain lands on a blocklist.

5 Klaviyo metrics to stop obsessing over

Open rate

Open rate effectively broke in September 2021 when Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection. iOS devices now pre-fetch emails and trigger opens automatically, regardless of whether a person ever read the message.

On many accounts today, 40% to 60% of reported opens are machine-generated. Klaviyo provides MPP filtering, but even filtered open rates are an approximation. Use click rate as your engagement proxy instead. Clicks still require a real person to act.

If open rate is still your primary success metric, you're optimizing for a number that no longer reflects human behavior.

Total click rate without bot filtering

Security bots scan links in emails to check for phishing, and they register as clicks in Klaviyo. If you have ever seen a spike in click rates with no corresponding lift in revenue, that is the most likely explanation.

The fix is simple: go to Settings > Email in Klaviyo and enable the Bot Activity Filter. From that point forward, only look at filtered click rates. The numbers may shift more than you expect.

Here's the problem: unfiltered click rates can be inflated by 20% to 40% in some accounts. Decisions made on that data are decisions made on noise.

Klaviyo-attributed revenue as your single source of truth

Klaviyo attributes revenue from orders placed within its attribution window, defaulting to 5 days for email and 1 day for SMS. You can read how this works in Klaviyo's attribution documentation. If someone clicks a Klaviyo email on Monday and buys Thursday after also seeing a paid ad on Wednesday, Klaviyo still claims the sale.

This isn't a flaw in the platform. It's how last-click attribution works. The problem is using Klaviyo revenue as the final word on channel performance. In practice, Klaviyo tends to over-attribute by 15% to 30% compared against a multi-touch model, based on the accounts I've audited.

Cross-reference Klaviyo revenue numbers with Google Analytics or a dedicated attribution tool. Klaviyo revenue is a useful data point, not the verdict on your program's health.

Unsubscribe rate as a red flag

A healthy unsubscribe rate means your list is self-cleaning. People who don't want to hear from you are leaving on their own terms, instead of marking you as spam, which does far more damage to your deliverability.

If unsubscribes spike after a campaign, that usually points to a segmentation problem: you sent to disengaged contacts who should have been suppressed. The answer is better targeting, not softer copy or less frequent sends.

Track unsubscribes in context. A 0.3% rate on a well-segmented send is healthier than a 0.05% rate on a list where nobody unsubscribes because they stopped opening months ago.

Raw list size

This is the oldest and most persistent misconception in email marketing. A 200,000-person list with 8% engagement will hurt your deliverability faster than a 15,000-person list with 45% engagement.

Inbox providers score your sending domain based on engagement signals, not volume. When a large portion of your list consistently ignores your emails, that pattern damages your sender reputation for everyone on your list, including the subscribers who do want to hear from you.

Suppress unengaged contacts (no open or click in 90 to 180 days) before they drag down the active part of your program. The list will look smaller. The results will be better.

What a useful Klaviyo dashboard actually looks like

Six numbers: RPR (weekly), flow revenue share (monthly), placed order rate by your top segments (monthly), active list growth (monthly), delivery rate (ongoing), and spam complaint rate (ongoing).

That's the full list. No unfiltered opens, no raw list size, no total attributed revenue sitting there making the program look more impressive than it is. Just the numbers that tell you whether the program is actually healthy and whether it's growing.

You can build this in Klaviyo custom reports in under an hour. The harder part is committing to not adding things back just because the data is available. Every metric you add is a metric you might optimize for, whether or not it reflects real performance.

Start with these six. When one of them surfaces a problem, dig deeper. That sequence keeps your attention on what matters instead of what is easy to report.

🚀 SPARKCRM monitors your Klaviyo metrics automatically: deliverability health, flow performance, engagement trends. It sends you an alert when something shifts. No manual dashboard-building, no waiting until your monthly review to catch a problem.

Try SPARKCRM free at sparkcrm.cc