Klaviyo Placed Order Rate: How It's Calculated and How to Use It

Klaviyo placed order rate is the share of a message's recipients who went on to place an order that Klaviyo credits to that message. Klaviyo calculates it as the number of orders placed within the channel's attribution window, divided by the number of unique recipients. We use it, together with revenue per recipient, to pick A/B test winners and compare campaigns, because opens and clicks don't pay the bills.

Your open rate went up last month. Your click rate too.

Revenue didn't move.

That happens more often than most brands think. Opens and clicks tell you people noticed the email. They don't tell you whether anyone bought.

Placed order rate does. Mostly. As long as you know what it counts, and what it doesn't.

By Emiel Dingemans, Founder of Magicianly

Updated October 2026

What Is Placed Order Rate in Klaviyo?

Placed order rate is the percentage of people who received an email or SMS and then placed an order that Klaviyo attributes to it. Think of it as Klaviyo's email conversion rate, with orders as the conversion.

Klaviyo's analytics glossary defines it as "orders placed within the channel's attribution window divided by the number of unique recipients of that message."

You'll find it in a few places:

• On the Campaigns tab, in the "Email performance last 30 days" summary, and in the conversion column next to each campaign when Placed Order is the selected conversion metric.
• In each flow email's 30-day snapshot, where the conversion rate is set to Placed Order rate by default.
• As one of the winning metrics you can choose for a campaign A/B test.

It runs on the Placed Order metric, so you need an ecommerce integration, like Shopify, sending order data into Klaviyo.

How Is Klaviyo Placed Order Rate Calculated?

Take the orders Klaviyo attributes to a message and divide them by the number of unique people who received it.

Placed order rate = attributed orders ÷ unique recipients × 100

Say a campaign goes to 10,000 people and Klaviyo attributes 30 orders to it. 30 ÷ 10,000 × 100 = 0.3%.

Simple enough. The interesting part is which orders make it into the top half of that fraction. Three things decide that.

1. The Attribution Window

An order only counts if it happens inside the channel's attribution window. For accounts created after October 9, 2024, Klaviyo's default is 5 days for email and SMS, and you can change it in your settings (Klaviyo Help Center). Older accounts may be set up differently, so check yours.

Change the window and your placed order rate changes with it, even though nobody bought anything differently.

2. The Interaction

For email, an order only counts if the person opened or clicked the message. Just receiving it isn't enough.

But Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens count as opens unless you exclude them in your settings. So some of those "openers" never actually looked at the email. We explain how that works in are your Klaviyo open rates real?

SMS works differently. Klaviyo can attribute an order to a text once it's delivered, no click needed. That's one reason email and SMS placed order rates aren't a fair comparison.

3. The Send Date

Klaviyo counts conversions on the day the message was sent. If you look at a report for a single day, you'll miss the orders that came in over the next few days. Pick a date range that covers the whole attribution window.

All of this is attribution logic, and Klaviyo attribution has real limits. More on that below.

What's the Difference Between Placed Order Rate, Revenue Per Recipient and Conversion Rate?

Placed order rate counts orders. Revenue per recipient counts the money. Conversion rate is the rate for whichever conversion metric you've selected, so with Placed Order selected, it's the same thing as placed order rate.

On the Flows tab, choosing a conversion metric with a monetary value, like Placed Order, switches the columns to Revenue and Revenue per recipient (Klaviyo Help Center).

We always read placed order rate and revenue per recipient together. Placed order rate tells you whether the email worked. Revenue per recipient tells you how much it was worth.

Why Do We Judge Emails on Placed Order Rate Instead of Opens?

Because opens and clicks are steps on the way. Orders are the point.

A subject line that gets more opens but fewer orders didn't win. A design that gets more clicks but fewer orders didn't win either. Sometimes the version with the lower click rate brings in more revenue. Which one do you want?

Opens are also the shakiest number in your account, thanks to Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Click rate is more useful, but it still only measures interest.

That's why placed order rate keeps surprising people. In our accounts, a plain-text email from the founder often beats a polished designed email, not just on click rate but on placed order rate. Here's why plain-text emails can win.

How Should You Use Placed Order Rate in A/B Tests?

Make it the winning metric for most campaign tests, split your audience 50/50 yourself, and give orders a couple of days to come in before you call a winner.

Klaviyo lets you choose open rate, click rate or placed order rate as the winning metric for a campaign A/B test. Placed order rate is only available if your account has a Placed Order metric (Klaviyo's A/B testing guide).

Here's how we set it up:

1. 1Winning metric: placed order rate. Use it for anything that can change whether people buy: the content, the offer, the products you show, the send time. Even for subject line tests, check the orders before you trust the extra opens.
2. 2A manual 50/50 split. Set the test size to 100%, so half your audience gets version A and the other half gets version B.
3. 3No automatic winner. A standard Klaviyo test sends each version to a test group, waits a few hours, then sends the winner to everyone else. A few hours is far too short to judge orders, and most of your list gets the email late.
4. 4Wait a couple of days before you compare. People take longer to buy than to open.
5. 5Write it down. The hypothesis, what you changed, the result, what you learned and what you'll test next. That's how one test turns into knowledge you can use again.

How Much Data Do You Need?

More than Klaviyo's label suggests. Klaviyo calls a campaign test statistically significant once at least 50 people have received each variation and the win probability is at least 90% (Klaviyo Help Center).

That's a low bar for opens, and a very low bar for orders. Orders are much rarer than opens, so 50 people per side can mean a handful of orders, or none at all.

For flow tests, we want at least 1,000 recipients per variant before we trust the result. For campaigns, we run the same test across several sends before we change anything. One result is a data point. The same result again and again is a pattern.

There's more on how we run tests in our guide to email A/B testing, and the same method applied to send times in the best time to send marketing emails.

How Do You Compare Placed Order Rate Across Campaigns?

Compare like with like, and look back further than last week.

Once a month, we go back through roughly the last 6 to 12 months of campaigns. Not sorted by open rate. Sorted by orders and revenue. The campaigns that actually generated business go on a list of winners. And we flag the ones that did well without a discount code, because those are the ones you can run again without giving away margin.

A few rules keep the comparison fair:

• Same campaign type. A product launch and a founder story do different jobs.
• Same kind of audience. A send to your 30-day engaged segment won't convert like a send to your 90-day engaged segment.
• Flows apart from campaigns. Flows go out right after someone shows intent, like starting a checkout, so they usually convert at a much higher rate. Putting them next to campaigns tells you nothing.
• Email apart from SMS. SMS attribution can count a delivered text. Email attribution needs an open or a click.
• The same attribution settings. If you changed your window, campaigns from before and after aren't measured the same way.

What Is a Good Placed Order Rate in Klaviyo?

There's no universal number. It depends on what you sell, your price point, who you send to and how often.

Klaviyo does give you a relative answer. In the email performance summary on the Campaigns tab, it rates your placed order rate against your peers or your industry: Excellent (75th percentile or better), Good (50th to 74th), Fair (25th to 49th) or Poor (below the 25th) (Klaviyo Help Center). It only shows once you've sent enough recently, starting with at least 3 campaigns and 100 recipients in the last 30 days.

That's a useful sanity check. The better benchmark is your own history: the same campaign type, to the same audience, over time. If your product-focused campaigns to engaged subscribers convert better this quarter than last, that's progress you can trust. We go deeper on this in our ecommerce email marketing benchmarks.

Can a Higher Placed Order Rate Be Bad News?

Yes. In two ways.

The discount trap. Put 30% off in an email and placed order rate will probably jump. That doesn't make it the winner. Check revenue per recipient, average order value, discount usage and margin. Then watch your full-price campaigns over the next few weeks. If your list learns there's always a sale around the corner, people stop buying at full price. That's why we keep it to about one real sale a month.

Orders that would have happened anyway. Placed order rate counts attributed orders, not extra orders. A loyal customer who reorders every month, opens your Tuesday email and reorders on Thursday counts as a conversion. So can a subscription renewal that happens to land inside the window. The email might have helped. It might not have mattered at all.

So placed order rate is the right number for judging emails against each other. It's the wrong number for judging whether email is growing the business. For that, look at repeat purchase rate, first-to-second purchase rate and lifetime value by cohort. Here are the retention metrics we actually track.

So How Should You Use Klaviyo Placed Order Rate?

• Know what it counts: attributed orders divided by unique recipients, inside your attribution window, and for email only after an open or a click.
• Read it next to revenue per recipient, never on its own.
• Make it the winning metric for most campaign A/B tests, with a manual 50/50 split and a couple of days' wait.
• Compare like with like: same campaign type, same audience, flows apart from campaigns, email apart from SMS.
• Benchmark against your own history first.
• Judge the business on retention, not on attributed orders.

Opens tell you who noticed. Placed order rate tells you who bought. Retention tells you who came back.