Abandoned Cart Emails: How Many, How Soon, Who Gets Credit

Send a short automated sequence, not a single email. Klaviyo, an email marketing tool, suggests two or three messages after a shopper starts checkout. The first goes out after two to four hours, the second a day or two later. A shopper who only viewed a product gets a lighter email after at least an hour. Each sequence stops when an order arrives. Google Ads and your email tool can both claim that order. Take the total from your store’s order list instead of adding the two reports together.

Cart and browse reminders are two of the automated messages covered in our guide to email and SMS for online stores. With paid traffic they carry more weight, because most visits from ads end without an order. In GetProfit data on 114 stores, each with at least eight months on record (June 2025 – June 2026), the median store turned 2.7% of ad clicks into conversions. That leaves about 97 of every 100 ad clicks without one.

How often do shoppers abandon a cart? The Baymard Institute collected 50 studies, and their average documented cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. That is an average of mixed studies, and your niche may differ, so measure your own rate before you judge your reminders.

Why shoppers leave, and which checkout fixes come first, is a separate question. We answer it in cart abandonment and checkout fixes. This article starts after the shopper has left: what to send, and how to count the order the message brings back.

How many messages, and how soon?

Klaviyo, an email marketing tool, publishes the schedule, and Shopify repeats it. Klaviyo’s guide (How to create an abandoned cart flow) puts the first message 2–4 hours after a shopper starts checkout and a second one 20–48 hours later. Citing data from its own ecommerce customers, Klaviyo says two or three messages give the best results.

Shopify’s guide (Abandoned Cart Emails: Best Practices & Examples) cites Klaviyo for its sequence. It places emails 2–4 hours and 24–48 hours after the shopper leaves, and adds a third if the first two get no response. So both guides describe one vendor’s schedule. Treat the delays as a starting point and test them in your store.

Each reminder sequence is an email flow: it starts on one shopper action and stops on another.

What goes into each message

1. First message, after 2–4 hours: a reminder. Show the product, its price and a link straight back to the cart. Shopify’s guide leaves the discount out of this one.
2. Second message, a day or two later: remove the doubt. Answer the questions that stop orders: the full price with delivery, the delivery date, returns and payment options. If you make a personalised offer or discount, Shopify’s guide puts it here.
3. Third message, optional: alternatives. Shopify’s guide suggests popular or related products for shoppers who ignored the first two.

A discount in the first message gives away margin on orders that shoppers might have placed anyway. If your margin allows an offer, keep it for the second message.

Cart or product page: which flow gets the shopper?

A cart shows a stronger intent to buy than a viewed product, so the browse flow is the lighter touch. In Klaviyo’s guide (How to create a browse abandonment flow), the browse flow stops when the shopper orders or starts checkout. If you also run a flow triggered by adding to cart, the browse flow stops on add to cart too. That way one shopper doesn’t get emails from both flows. A shopper enters the browse flow at most once in 30 days.

Email, SMS or a remarketing ad?

The same shopper can get three reminders: an email, an SMS and an ad. Each reaches a different group of people, and email is the one to set up first.

What your checkout asks for decides who can enter the email and SMS flows. SMS and messengers for online stores covers which channel suits shoppers in Ukraine, Czechia or Slovakia.

In Performance Max, a cart segment works only as a signal, a hint about who to look for. Google Ads Help on data segments says Performance Max uses only optimized targeting. Its ads may show to people outside your selections if they are likely to convert.

As a result, you can’t keep a Performance Max budget just for shoppers who left a cart. We look at whether a separate campaign for them pays off in remarketing for online stores.

In our data, almost all the ad budget runs through Performance Max

Performance Max runs in 141 of 146 stores in our data and takes a median 95.7% of their ad budget (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026). Display campaigns run in 16 of those stores and take a median 0.5% of the budget where they run. Demand Gen runs in 18 stores and takes a median 2.7%.

For a typical store, both the ad behind the first click and the ad that follows the shopper afterwards most likely come from Performance Max. Your bidding learns on its conversions. The conversion window is the period after an ad click during which Google Ads still counts a purchase. If the shopper clicked an ad inside that window, a recovered order can land in Google Ads conversions, whichever message brought them back.

These numbers are observations across stores, not an experiment. We count each share inside one store, so currencies don’t mix.

Why do the email and the ad both claim the recovered order?

Each system counts the order by its own rules and decides who gets the credit.

Google Ads. According to Google Ads Help (Create conversions from Google Analytics events in Google Ads), Google Ads measures conversions only from Google Ads sources. The default click-through conversion window is 30 days (About conversion windows). Say a shopper clicks a Shopping ad on Monday and comes back from your email on Wednesday to buy. Google Ads counts that order as its conversion, dated Monday.

The email tool. According to Klaviyo’s help centre (Understanding message conversion tracking), Klaviyo credits the last of its own messages that the shopper opened or clicked. For accounts created after 9 October 2024, the default window is 5 days for email and SMS. Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens emails automatically, and those opens also count unless you exclude them.

GA4. According to Analytics Help (Select attribution settings), GA4 shares the credit for each key event, such as a purchase, between the interactions on the path. The shares add up to one. The default lookback window for a purchase is 90 days. GA4 puts a visit in the Email channel only when its source or medium is email, and in SMS when it is exactly “sms” (Default channel group).

Example: one month, one cart flow, two claims

Example store, not client data.

A tableware shop gets 300 orders a month. Google Ads reports 250 purchase conversions, and the email tool credits the cart flow with 40 orders. Of those 40 shoppers, 30 had clicked a Google ad within the previous 30 days, so both reports include their orders.

The sum looks plausible next to 300, so the overlap is easy to miss. You can’t find it order by order inside Google Ads either: according to Google Ads Help, Google Ads doesn’t report transaction IDs.

Both reports are right. The flow’s report shows which orders it touched, and Google Ads shows which orders its bidding learns on. The mistake is adding them up, or crediting the flow with all 40 orders when you decide how big a discount it can afford.

Which Google Ads settings distort the count?

Two of them: a second primary purchase goal and a funnel step set as the goal. They work inside the Google Ads account, on top of any overlap with your email tool.

Two primary purchase goals. Each of these goals is a conversion action in Google Ads. A primary conversion action appears in the Conversions column and feeds bidding. A secondary one shows only in All conversions (About primary and secondary conversion actions).

A transaction ID removes duplicates within one conversion action: Google Ads drops a second conversion of the same action with the same ID (Use a transaction ID to minimize duplicate conversions). If the Google Ads tag and a GA4 import are both primary, they are two separate actions, and the same order can count twice. That includes the orders your email recovered.

GA4-based conversions start as secondary, so the double count appears when someone switches one to primary. A goal from your shop platform or an old tag can create the same double count.

A funnel step as the goal. If add to cart or begin checkout is a primary goal, Google optimises for started actions instead of paid orders. It then looks for more people who fill carts, and your flow later has to recover some of those carts. Google Ads takes credit for the cart, and the email takes credit for the order.

The portal’s Conversion check looks for both cases. It sees when two primary goals count one and the same purchase, and lowers trust for the campaigns where that happens. It separates purchases and leads from everything else and shows which goals are primary and really fire.

The portal reads your Google Ads account and Merchant Center feed; your email tool stays outside its view. It doesn’t check the attribution model, conversion windows or counting method (one conversion per click, or every one).

How to count a recovered order once

1. Decide which report has the final word before launch. Your store’s order list gives the total. GA4, with one rule for all channels, gives the split between them. Read each platform’s report on its own.
2. Keep one primary purchase goal in Google Ads. Make sure it sends the transaction ID, and set GA4 imports and shop platform goals to secondary. You’ll find the setting under Goals → Conversions → Summary → Edit goal, in Conversion action optimization. If someone else manages the account, agree on the change with them first.
3. Keep add to cart and begin checkout secondary. They stay visible in All conversions without steering bids, as long as no custom goal includes them.
4. Tag every link in your emails and SMS messages. Use utm_medium=email for email and utm_medium=sms for SMS, so GA4 puts the returning visit in the right channel.
5. Read your email tool’s attribution settings. Note the window and whether opens count. In Klaviyo, the default window is 5 days, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens count unless you exclude them.
6. Compare full weeks, not single days. Google Ads records the order on the day of the ad click, and GA4 on the day of the purchase. An order from a Monday click, recovered on Wednesday, sits on different days in the two reports.
7. Measure what the flow adds. Keep a random share of shoppers out of the flow and compare their orders with the rest. We explain how to run such a holdout test, and which email metrics are still worth comparing, in what email really adds to your sales.

What your ads are really learning on. An order counted twice. An amount substituted for the real one. A payment several times larger than your usual basket. The portal checks what stands behind them. The portal changes nothing without your consent.

Check your conversions →

Sources

• How to create an abandoned cart flow — vendor guide (Klaviyo): Started Checkout or Added to Cart as the trigger; first message 2–4 hours after checkout starts, second 20–48 hours later; two or three messages work best, based on Klaviyo’s data from its own ecommerce customers; the flow stops when an order is placed; set up email first, then add SMS. Checked 2 October 2026.
• How to create a browse abandonment flow — vendor guide (Klaviyo): Viewed Product as the trigger; a delay of at least one hour; exit on order or checkout, and on add to cart if an add-to-cart flow also runs; no re-entry within 30 days; a lighter touchpoint than the cart flow. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Understanding message conversion tracking — Klaviyo credits the last opened or clicked message of its own channels; default window of 5 days for email and SMS for accounts created after 9 October 2024; Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens count by default and can be excluded. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Abandoned Cart Emails: Best Practices & Examples (2026) — vendor guide (Shopify, updated 11 August 2026), citing Klaviyo for the sequence: three emails at 2–4 hours, 24–48 hours and a third for non-responders; no discount in the first, an optional offer in the second, related products in the third. Checked 2 October 2026.
• 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026 — Baymard Institute: 70.22% average documented cart abandonment rate, an average of 50 studies; page last updated 22 September 2025. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About your data segments — a segment of people who added to cart but didn’t buy; Performance Max uses only optimized targeting, where audience selections are signals and ads may serve beyond them. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About dynamic remarketing — ads with the products a visitor viewed, from the retailer’s Merchant Center feed. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Create conversions from Google Analytics events in Google Ads — Google Ads measures conversions only from Google Ads sources; it dates a conversion by the click, Analytics by the conversion. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About conversion windows — default click-through conversion window of 30 days. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About primary and secondary conversion actions — primary actions go to the Conversions column and bidding, secondary ones to All conversions; GA4-based conversions are secondary by default; where to change the setting. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Use a transaction ID to minimize duplicate conversions — duplicates of the same conversion action with the same transaction ID are not counted; transaction IDs are not reported in Google Ads. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Select attribution settings — fractional credit that adds up to one per key event; 90-day default lookback for key events other than first_open and first_visit; paid and organic channels by default in GA4 reports. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Default channel group — Email channel when source or medium is email; SMS when source or medium exactly matches sms. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit data: 114 stores with at least eight months on record, June 2025 – June 2026 — median conversion rate from an ad click.
• GetProfit data: 146 online stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — Performance Max, Display and Demand Gen: number of stores and median share of budget.
• GetProfit portal methodology, Conversion check — duplicate primary goals, a funnel step as the goal, what the check leaves out.