Understand custom metrics
As your business becomes more complex, the metrics you look at to measure performance become increasingly complex. For example, brands like yours may expand their customer retention efforts through a subscription option for automatic product replenishment. Programs like this are extremely valuable to the bottom line, but in order to measure the true impact, you need a reporting tool that allows you to get granular beyond the standard Placed Order metric.
A custom metric is essentially a new lens through which you can analyze conversion activity in select Klaviyo reporting. Customer metrics are altered versions of metrics that already exist in your account.
You can create more refined metrics by filtering an existing metric by specific properties (e.g., splitting subscription-based orders out into their own metric). Conversely, you can create more holistic metrics by joining metrics together (e.g., joining point of sale and online orders). To support your unique business goals, you can create up to 50 custom conversion metrics.
Define your own custom metrics for reporting
The more data you connect to Klaviyo, the more likely it is that you will need to manipulate that data in some way for it to be useful. Create metrics that reflect your business so you can hone in on specific performance indicators. Explore popular use cases for custom metrics below, and then look at your own data to determine which metrics you might like to combine or refine in your own account.
Separate subscription revenue from one-time purchases
Some pre-built integrations like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce will send a Placed Order event to Klaviyo, regardless of if the order was generated in isolation or by an ongoing subscription. While all orders sync to Klaviyo under the Placed Order event, each event will contain a nested property that indicates whether the source of the event was a subscription or not.
If you would like to be able to get a more accurate view of how your marketing efforts are influencing one-time purchases, you can remove the “subscription” type Placed Order events by creating a custom metric and filtering out events that contain “subscription” as a source.
Include subscription revenue in your revenue reporting
Conversely, some integrations or third-party subscription management apps may send their own separate metrics into Klaviyo. If you’d like to be able to view total revenue performance across subscriptions and isolated purchases, you can create a custom metric that combines the Placed Order metric with the Subscription started and/or Subscription renewed metrics. This will give you a total picture of revenue generated.
This also works for cases where you may be selling content-based membership subscriptions in addition to products through ecommerce. Depending on your tech stack, you may be getting content subscriber events to Klaviyo in one metric (via an app or plug-in) and ecommerce events as a separate event. You can combine these metrics into a more holistic metric to view total revenue conversion performance.
Separate point of sale (POS) purchases from ecommerce orders
Your ecommerce platform may send all Placed Order or Ordered Product events into Klaviyo as the same event, regardless of if they were placed using a point of sale (POS) system at a physical store, or placed online. You may want to view conversion performance separately for POS and ecommerce. You can achieve this by creating two new custom metrics, one for each sales channel.
Isolate performance of certain brands, categories, or product types
Your business may sell a collection of different brands, different categories, or perhaps you even drop-ship third-party products from a different vendor. If this is the case, you may want to view Placed Order or Ordered Product data that specifically pertains to that brand, category, or third-party product category. You can create a custom metric that filters your existing Ordered Product event.
Understand how discount usage impacts revenue
If you ran a big promotion using a specific discount code, you may want to look at how many orders were placed using that specific code, or you might want to see how much revenue was associated with orders who had that specific code in the order versus not.
You could create two new custom metrics and compare the performance of both. Create one new metric that filters your Placed Order metric down to only the instances that contain the specific discount code. Then, create a second metric that filters your Placed Order metric down to only instances that do not contain the code. You can then view your reports using these metrics to see whether the discount contributed to higher overall revenue.
Once you have created custom metrics in your account, you will be able to use various select reporting tools in Klaviyo to understand how your marketing efforts are driving results against these specific metrics. Check out our guide on using custom metrics to see a full list of all reporting surfaces where you can view reports using your custom metrics.