Hi @Ben,

Welcome to the Community! 

There is a wonderful, detailed thread here on the Community that talks about how best to tackle the discrepancies between Klaviyo and GA. If you have not already, I definitely recommend giving it a read:

Past that, we also have to accommodate GA4 now as of this past summer, which comes with it’s own challenges. Something another Community member highlighted here:

For your query, aside from the technical tracking side of things, this could also be a result of the differences in how Google and Klaviyo attribute revenue. 

Google Analytics will attribute revenue to email only if the user opens & clicks the email, and makes a purchase in that same session when they clicked on the email while they still have the Klaviyo UTM codes displayed on the browser. 

Klaviyo attributes revenue differently. If a user opens an email, they don’t need to immediately make a purchase in that session for it to be attributed revenue. If they open it and then buy in the next 5 days, this will be attributed as revenue that happened because of the email that they opened previously. 

You are able to adjust your Klaviyo message attribution settings should you wish to more closely align with how Google does things, but I generally leave these settings as is because I have found that it does not account for the nuances of a users visiting the site in a session separate from opening the email, and making a purchase that was influenced by that email. 

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Hope this helps!

-- Ashley Ismailovski

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for the posts but as mentioned, $0 isn’t an attribution discrepancy but rather, seems to indicate that Google isn’t recognising Klaviyo’s emails period - right?

I’ve done more digging, and found a user @Omar who thinks that the default setup in Klaviyo is wrong and results in none of Klaviyo’s emails being attributed to ‘email’ by GA4…

“Please change the default tracking in Klaviyo. The way this is setup as default is wrong.
Just make sure when you go in setting to configure utm_medium to email (and use lowercase).”

If someone could confirm that @Omar is correct and that Klaviyo’s defaults aren’t compatible with GA4, then I’ll do as he suggests. Just don’t want to make a bad situation worse!

Any help/suggestions/confirmation of the issue would be much appreciated.

Cheers, Ben

@Ashley I. See above post for what the user @Omar claims about Klaviyo defaults in a different thread.

@Omar suggests changing the medium defaults from either ‘campaign’ or ‘flow’ (see attached) to ‘email’ in lowercase so GA4 correctly attributes sales and traffic to email in basic reports.

But will changing these to ‘email’ affect reports on Klaviyo or on other platforms like Shopify? For example, on Klaviyo we see this distinction which is obviously useful...

But despite Klaviyo saying we generated $42k from email, GA4 shows $0…

In fact, GA4 thinks email generated just 1 user session for the whole month of November!

This is much more than a discrepancy because zero sales or traffic is being attributed to email - right?

If you have time, any help would be much appreciated. Cheers, Ben

Hey @Ben ,

yes, I can confirm that @Omar is correct. Change your UTM settings so that medium equals email, and data should start flowing correctly. 

With the mediums being campaign or flow, GA4 doesn’t know what those mediums are so wont attribute them to email. Alternatively, you could make a custom channel grouping in GA4 but much easier to just change the UTMs in Klaviyo. 

@Akers Digital Thanks for the reply.

So just confirming that changing the medium for flows and campaigns to ‘email’ won’t change the reporting in Klaviyo which distinguishes between flows and campaigns?

You got it @Ben .

Changing the UTM won't impact Klaviyo reporting.