Klaviyo’s CDP: What’s Missing and Why It Matters
Klaviyo’s interpretation of a CDP differs significantly from what platforms like Segment, mParticle, or Bloomreach define as a CDP. Here’s why:
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
Klaviyo’s interpretation of a CDP differs significantly from what platforms like Segment, mParticle, or Bloomreach define as a CDP.
Here’s why:
Last year Klaviyo introduced a Customer Data Platform (CDP) as part of their product offering, with pricing starting at $500 per month. This makes it one of the most affordable options on the market, if not the cheapest.
How can their CDP be so much cheaper than other solutions? Is there a catch? We believe there is—and it’s a significant one.
What is the CDP, anyway?
Let’s start with a definition. Klaviyo’s website offers a clear explanation of what a CDP is:
In eCommerce, customer data is often scattered across multiple systems. This lack of centralization makes it difficult to maintain a consistent customer experience across different channels. A CDP (Customer Data Platform) solves this by acting as a central hub, connecting to other tools like your ESP, website personalization, CRO, and analytics platforms. This way, you have a unified “single source of truth” about your customers.
For example, if you want to analyze your website’s performance and calculate basic metrics like the number of daily visitors or conversion rates, you can typically rely on data from a CDP, as it tracks and unifies the behavior of all your customers. Similarly, if you want to personalize your homepage for all visitors, such as displaying last viewed products to a returning visitor who recently interacted a specific category, a CDP would store every interaction to make this possible.
However, with Klaviyo’s CDP, you cannot do these things.
Who is considered a customer?
The key—and often overlooked—difference between Klaviyo’s CDP and most other CDPs lies in how they define a "customer."
When analyzing your website traffic, you can divide visitors into two main categories:
Anonymous visitors – These make up around 85% of your traffic. They’re labeled as anonymous because you can’t link them to a known email address or phone number. Their only identifier is a cookie generated by the CDP.
Known visitors – These account for about 15% of your traffic. You can associate these visitors with a specific email address or phone number, allowing you to communicate with them through those channels.
CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Bloomreach Engagement define a customer as any visitor to your website, including anonymous users. As a result, they track and retain the behavior of these anonymous visitors by default, even if the visitors never provide their email address.
Now, let’s look at Klaviyo’s approach.
Klaviyo’s documentation explicitly states that they do not store data on anonymous users in their system:
Klaviyo does track the behavior of anonymous visitors, but this data is stored only in the visitor’s browser, meaning it cannot be used for analytics or data activation, such as personalization. The data is stored in Klaviyo’s system only when a visitor identifies themselves with an identifier such as an email address or phone number.
Since 85% of website visitors never identify themselves, this data is inaccessible to Klaviyo’s CDP.
As a result, if you want to perform simple analyses—such as tracking daily number of visitors or calculating your website’s conversion rate—you’ll need to rely on a different system with separate tracking. Similarly, if you want to show last-viewed products to a returning visitor who hasn’t provided their email, you’ll need to rely on a separate dataset that tracks the behavior of anonymous users.
So how can this product be called a CDP? By definition, a CDP is supposed to eliminate isolated datasets by creating a unified source of truth for all customer data.
Klaviyo can’t do this for 85% of your visitors. You’d still need one dataset for website analytics and another for personalization, leaving you with siloed data.
Every other CDP we’ve tested doesn’t have this issue because they store anonymous profiles as well.
This raises a serious question: Is it even fair to call this product a CDP if it fails to completely solve one of the core problems it was designed to address?
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