Funnels
Why your abandoned cart emails might be taking credit for sales you already had
Short answerAbandoned cart email attribution counts a sale as “recovered” when someone who left the checkout later buys after getting the email. Some of those people were coming back anyway, and your ads are often claiming the same sale at the same time. Judge cart emails against real sales from your payment processor, test them against a group that doesn’t get them, and fix heavy abandonment on the page first.
Open almost any email platform and there’s a number sitting on the dashboard for your abandoned cart flow. Revenue recovered. It’s usually a nice number, and it’s usually the reason nobody ever questions the flow again.
I’m not against cart emails. I run them. But I don’t trust that number, for the same reason I don’t trust the one Facebook shows me.
Every tool wants credit for the same sale
I stopped trusting platform-reported ROAS a long time ago. Picture it: a person comes from an ad, buys something, comes back a couple of hours later and looks at a few other products, and Facebook happily reports all that money as something it made you. Reporting that makes the platform look good isn’t the same as reporting what happened.
Abandoned cart email attribution works the same way. Someone clicks your ad, starts checkout, leaves, gets your cart email the next morning, clicks the ad again that afternoon and buys. Depending on your attribution settings, Facebook will often credit an ad for that purchase. Your email tool credits the cart email. Add up what every tool says it made you and the total is bigger than what actually landed in your bank account.
So the only number I build decisions on is the one I can check myself: total purchases and total revenue from the payment processor, against total ad spend. That gives me a true cost per acquisition. Everything else is a tool’s opinion of its own performance.
A tag tells you who got the email, not why they bought
Here’s a real one from my own business. I once looked at an export of buyers from one of my low-ticket offers. More than half of the buyers in it also carried the abandoned-cart tag.
It’s very tempting to read that as “more than half my sales came through the cart flow”. But all the tag really tells you is that more than half of those buyers stepped away from the checkout at some point. Whether the email is what brought them back, the tag can’t tell you. Some would have come back on their own, or through the next ad they saw.
That’s not a knock on the emails. It’s a reminder that “received the email and later bought” and “bought because of the email” are two very different sentences, and abandoned cart email attribution only ever shows you the first one.
Heavy abandonment is often a page problem
The other reason I don’t celebrate a big recovered-revenue number is what it often means. Lots of recovered carts means lots of abandoned carts in the first place.
Someone coming from a cold ad isn’t saying yes yet. They’re saying maybe. If they can get to the checkout before they’re actually sold, a lot of them will, and then they’ll bail. In a jaded market especially, you don’t want cold traffic reaching the purchase too fast. I walked through one real version of this in what to do when your CPA doubles but your CTR stays the same, and the fix there was on the page, not in the follow-up.
Cart emails can patch some of that. They can’t fix it. If a big share of your checkouts are being abandoned, work out which page is actually losing the money and look hard at the checkout itself before you write another reminder email.
How to find out what the emails are really worth
The only clean way I know to check abandoned cart email attribution is to hold some people back.
For a few weeks, split new cart abandoners at random into two groups. One gets your cart sequence, the other gets nothing. Then compare the share of each group that ends up buying, using sales from your processor, not the email tool’s report. The difference between those two rates is what the emails actually add. Everything the no-email group bought, the emails were never going to earn.
Two honest caveats. You need enough abandoners for the comparison to mean anything, so on a small funnel this might take a while. And you’ll give up a few sales from the holdout while you test. I’d still rather know.
When the cart emails really are earning it
Plenty of recovered sales are real, and I want to be fair about that.
The way I think about email is as long-form retargeting. One approach is short-term, where you’re getting as many people as possible to come back and buy. The other is longer, for more sophisticated, untrusting markets, where you keep showing up with value until they’re ready. A cart email that answers the question that stopped someone, or catches a person who simply got interrupted, is doing genuine work.
So keep the flow. Just stop treating its abandoned cart email attribution as profit, and don’t let it talk you out of fixing the page that’s sending people out the door.
What to do this week
Pull the last 60 days of sales from your payment processor and total them. Next to that, write down what your ad platform says it drove and what your email tool says the cart flow recovered. If the claims add up to more than the real total, you’ve found the overlap. Then set up a simple holdout on the cart flow so the next 60 days tell you what it really adds.
Do abandoned cart emails actually work?
They often do some real work, especially when they answer the doubt that stopped the purchase or catch people who were interrupted. But the recovered-revenue number in your email tool includes people who would have bought anyway. The only way to know what the emails add is to compare buyers who got them against a group that didn’t.
Why don’t my Facebook purchases match my actual sales?
Facebook’s reporting is modeled and attributed by its own rules, so one sale can be credited to an ad while your email tool credits an email for the same purchase. Neither is lying exactly, they’re each counting generously. Use your payment processor as the source of truth and divide total spend by total purchases.
What is a good abandoned cart recovery rate?
I don’t put much weight on the recovery rate itself, because it counts buyers who were coming back regardless. The number I’d rather know is the difference in purchase rate between abandoners who got the emails and a holdout group who didn’t. That’s the part the emails actually earned.
P.S. Any time a tool reports a number that makes the tool look good, ask what would have happened if it had done nothing at all. That’s the number that matters.
