First-time purchasers report

The first-time purchasers report allows marketers to separate first-time purchase revenue from repeat purchase revenue across all their marketing channels. This helps you understand whether your campaigns are bringing in new customers or driving repeat purchases from existing customers.

What business question does this report answer?

The first-time purchasers report answers the critical question: Are my campaigns bringing in first-time customers, or are they strong at bringing in repeat purchases?

This is important because:

• New customer acquisition and repeat customer engagement often require different strategies
• You can identify campaigns that over-optimize for repeat customers while missing new acquisition
• You can track revenue trends separately to see if you're maintaining a healthy balance

Report controls and settings

Top-level controls

When you access the first-time purchasers report, you can configure:

• Attribution model - Select which attribution model to use (linear, first-touch, last-touch, time decay, or position-based)
• Attribution type - Choose between "lookback" or "look forward" window
• Revenue group - Select the revenue group you want to analyze
• Saved views - Apply any saved views from the dashboard

What data the report shows

The report breaks out all conversions and sales into first-time purchases versus repeat purchases:

Summary metrics

• First-time purchase revenue - Total dollar value from first-time purchases
• Repeat attributed revenue - Total revenue from repeat purchases
• Advertising spend - Total ad spend for the selected period
• First-time purchases count - Number of first-time conversions
• Repeat purchases count - Number of repeat conversions
• Revenue per sale (first-time) - Average revenue per first-time purchase
• Revenue per sale (repeat) - Average revenue per repeat purchase

Visual chart

A chart displays three key lines over time:

• Advertising spend
• First-time revenue
• Repeat customer revenue

This visualization helps you spot trends and shifts in the balance between new and repeat customer revenue.

Granular breakdown

You can drill down to see first-time vs. repeat performance at multiple levels:

• Channel
• Campaign
• Ad group
• Keyword
• Keyword variation

For each level and time period, you'll see:

• First-time revenue
• Repeat customer revenue
• Number of first-time conversions
• Number of repeat conversions

How it works

Since Attribution tracks every visitor each time they arrive to your pages, the system knows which visitors are making their first purchase ever versus returning for a repeat purchase. If you need a refresher on how Attribution tracks visitors, check out the 'visits & visitors' article.

Example use case: Balancing new vs. repeat customer acquisition

An agency launched a Klaviyo campaign to re-engage repeat customers. Using the first-time purchasers report, they observed:

Initial success:

• The repeat customer revenue line (blue line) skyrocketed as the re-engagement campaign worked

Unintended consequence:

• They over-optimized for repeat customers
• Too much ad spend was pulled away from new customer acquisition
• The first-time revenue line dropped significantly

Dashboard vs. report insight:

• On the main dashboard, total revenue appeared flat
• Within the first-time purchasers report, they could see the shift in revenue composition
• This allowed them to rebalance their campaigns to maintain healthy new customer acquisition while still engaging repeat customers

This example demonstrates how the report helps you avoid over-optimizing for one segment at the expense of the other, ensuring a balanced growth strategy.

Getting started

The first-time purchasers report is available as an additional paid feature.

If you have any questions on this please feel free to contact [email protected]