Why was one number never enough?
Every email report tries to answer one honest question with one number: what did email make? The trouble is that the truth has two halves, and a single number has to hide one of them to exist. So it hides the awkward half, the sales email touched but cannot prove, by quietly folding them in with the sales it can. The result looks confident and reads as fiction. (How large that fiction usually runs, and how to measure it on your own campaigns, is the subject of our guide to auditing inflated attributed revenue. This piece is the model that fixes what that one exposes.)
The fix is not a cleverer formula. It is to stop pretending one number can hold two different kinds of truth. Split the credit into two piles, name them plainly, and never add them together. We call the two piles confirmed and provisional.
What counts as confirmed revenue?
Confirmed revenue is the money email can prove it earned. The proof is a chain you could show someone. This shopper opened this email and came back through its link, or redeemed a code that was hers alone, and your store recorded the order. Subtract anything refunded or cancelled, and what remains is confirmed.
- It is provable. There is a trail from the email to the order, not a coincidence of timing.
- It is net. Refunds and cancellations come out, because a sale that was handed back is not revenue, and plenty are handed back. The National Retail Federation expects 19.3 percent of online sales to be returned in 2025, nearly one order in five.
- It is conservative. If the link between email and order cannot be shown, the sale does not go in this pile: no benefit of the doubt.
Confirmed revenue is the number you repeat out loud, to a partner, an accountant, yourself at planning time. It is usually smaller than the figure other tools show, and that smallness is the point: it is the part you would still believe after an audit.
What counts as provisional revenue?
Provisional revenue is everything email probably helped with but cannot prove. She got your campaign on Monday, thought about it, and bought on Thursday by typing your address straight into her browser. Email may well have tipped her, but there is no chain to show it, only timing. That sale is real; email's claim on it is not proven.
This pile is not a lie and it is not worthless. It is a signal: a sense of the influence email carries beyond what it can strictly prove. Watch it, learn from its shape, celebrate when it grows. Just never bank on it, and never let it touch the confirmed number. The moment provisional revenue gets added into confirmed, both numbers lose their meaning.
Why keeping them apart changes what you do
This is not bookkeeping for its own sake. The split changes the decisions you make on Monday morning.
- You stop over-discounting. When you can see which campaigns truly earned, you stop pouring coupons into ones that only appeared to.
- You plan on solid ground. Budgets and forecasts built on confirmed revenue survive contact with reality; ones built on a flattering blend do not. Payments can vanish too: dispute-management firm Chargebacks911 puts the average chargeback rate for online card payments between 0.6 and 1 percent of transactions. That is money that looked like revenue until it was clawed back.
- You give email fair credit, honestly. Provisional revenue lets you acknowledge email's wider influence without inventing a number. You can say 'email is helping here' without dressing a guess as a fact.
The deeper payoff is trust in your own dashboard. When the number in front of you is one you have never had to talk yourself into believing, you make faster, braver decisions, because you are not secretly discounting your own reports.
| Confirmed revenue | Provisional signals |
|---|---|
| An order the store itself verified | A sign that email touched the journey |
| Counted as revenue, net of refunds | Counted as influence, never as revenue |
| Credited to the exact message that earned it | Noted where email helped, without a hard number |
| What you safely budget and forecast on | What you read as direction, not proof |
Where Overvio fits
Confirmed and provisional is not a report we add on. It is how Overvio counts everything. Every sale email touches is sorted into one of the two piles the moment it happens. Proven ones become confirmed revenue; influenced-but-unprovable ones become provisional. The two are never summed into a single flattering figure.
Confirmed revenue leans on proof you can see: orders your store recorded, and one-time codes that belong to a single shopper so a redemption is unambiguous. Provisional revenue lives beside it in the same analytics view, labeled for what it is. You get the whole truth, in two honest halves, instead of one confident number that hides the seam.