Your Klaviyo conversion metric decides what every report says

Every Klaviyo account has a conversion metric set somewhere in its reporting configuration, and most agencies inherit it from whoever set the account up rather than checking it. That single setting silently rewrites every revenue figure, every conversion rate, and every flow comparison the account produces.

What the conversion metric does

The conversion metric tells Klaviyo which event counts as "a conversion" when it computes attributed revenue, conversion rate, and flow-to-flow comparisons. Change the metric and every one of those numbers can shift — not because performance changed, but because the definition of success changed underneath it.

Placed Order vs Ordered Product vs custom

Klaviyo fires a Placed Order event once per completed checkout, and a separate Ordered Product event for each line item in that order. A single order containing three different products generates one Placed Order event and three Ordered Product events. Set as the conversion metric, Placed Order will report that as one conversion; Ordered Product will report it as three, each carrying a share of the order's value. Neither is "correct" — they answer different questions — but comparing a flow measured on one against a flow measured on the other produces numbers that look comparable and aren't (see Klaviyo's documentation on changing the conversion metric). Custom metrics — for example, Placed Order filtered to exclude subscription renewals — let an account define its own version of "a real conversion" when neither default fits.

Headless, subscriptions and custom integrations

Stores with a headless checkout, a subscription model, or a custom cart integration often don't fire Klaviyo's default ecommerce events the way a standard Shopify or WooCommerce integration does. When that's the case, the default conversion metric can silently under- or over-count, and the account needs a custom metric built around whatever event that store's stack actually fires reliably. This is worth checking explicitly on any account with a non-standard checkout, not assumed to work out of the box.

Changing it is not retroactive in your reporting

Switching the conversion metric changes how future reports compute, but historical reports already pulled under the old metric don't restate themselves. If you change metrics partway through a quarter, note the date it changed anywhere you're comparing before-and-after — otherwise a report comparing this month to last month may actually be comparing two different definitions of "conversion", not two periods of the same thing.

Auditing it on every account you take over

A five-point check worth running on any account you're inheriting: which conversion metric is currently set, whether it matches what the client's own reporting (Shopify, their own analytics) considers a conversion, whether the store's checkout is standard enough for the default events to fire reliably, whether it's been changed recently, and whether every flow's reporting is using the account-level default or an overridden metric of its own.

Why we make you pick it once

Inteleve asks for a conversion metric when you connect a Klaviyo account, and keeps using that same one for every scan afterward — precisely so two periods on the same account are always being compared on the same definition, without anyone having to remember to check.