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Metrics type: Supporting MetricsCategory: Ecommerce Platform
Top Coupons by Usage (30d).

At a glance

A ranked horizontal bar chart of your coupon codes ordered by redemption count over the last 30 days. It answers “which promotions are actually being used” and surfaces the codes worth watching for margin impact, abuse, or expiry. Every WooCommerce coupon carries a running usage_count; this card ranks the deltas over the period.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your WooCommerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A UK skincare brand on self-hosted WooCommerce 8.7 with the Stripe Gateway plugin and the Smart Coupons extension. Several promotions ran concurrently. The 30-day window covers 22 May 26 to 20 Jun 26. Four things to notice:
  1. The top code by count is not the top code by cost. FREESHIP leads on redemptions but each redemption is a small shipping subsidy. SUMMER20 at rank 3 likely costs more in absolute discount despite a third of the volume. Reading this card alongside Discount as % of Revenue prevents the “high usage equals high cost” trap.
  2. Auto-applied codes dominate. FREESHIP is auto-applied by Smart Coupons over a £40 threshold, so almost every qualifying cart redeems it without the customer typing anything. That is why it sits far above the typed codes. This is expected behaviour, not abuse.
  3. A code climbing fast is worth investigating. If VIP15 had jumped from rank 8 to rank 4 in a week, it could mean the loyalty code leaked publicly. The ranking is the early-warning surface; cross-check with Coupon Stacking Abuse to see whether the climbing code is being combined with others.
  4. Codes near their usage_limit need attention. SUMMER20 had a usage_limit of 150 and is at 141 redemptions. It will stop working at 150, and customers who expect it will hit checkout friction. The ranking surfaces this so marketing can extend or replace the code before it caps out.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against WooCommerce

Where to look in WooCommerce Admin: WP Admin > Marketing > Coupons lists every coupon with a “Usage / Limit” column showing lifetime redemptions. For a period view, WP Admin > WooCommerce > Reports > Orders > Coupons by date breaks down usage and discount value over a date range. Set the same 30-day window to compare against this card’s ranking. Other WP Admin views that look related but are not:
  • Marketing > Coupons “Usage / Limit” column: shows lifetime usage_count, not period redemptions. A code that was huge last year but quiet this month still shows a large lifetime number there but a small bar here.
  • WooCommerce Analytics > Coupons (WC 4.0+): uses the separate Analytics engine with its own status filtering and can diverge slightly from the legacy reports.
Why our number may legitimately differ from WP Admin: Because this is a ranking, exact counts matter less than relative order. The top three codes should agree with the WC Coupons-by-date report once the window and timezone are aligned.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Does this rank by usage or by discount value? By usage count. A small free-shipping code redeemed 600 times outranks a 50%-off code redeemed 40 times even though the latter may cost far more. For the cost view, read this alongside Discount as % of Revenue. Treat the two as a pair: what is popular versus what is expensive. Why is a code I disabled still showing? The ranking covers the last 30 days. A code disabled three days ago still shows its redemptions from earlier in the window. It drops off once those redemptions age out of the 30-day window. If a disabled code is still accruing new redemptions, it was not fully disabled, check the coupon’s expiry date and status in Marketing > Coupons. Do auto-applied coupons count? Yes. Plugins like Smart Coupons and Advanced Coupons can auto-apply a code based on cart conditions. Those redemptions land in coupon_lines exactly like typed codes, so they rank here. This is why an auto-applied free-shipping code often tops the chart even though no customer ever typed it. Why does my WP Admin Coupons list show a bigger number? The Coupons list “Usage / Limit” column is lifetime cumulative; this card is the 30-day window. An old evergreen code can have tens of thousands of lifetime redemptions but only a few hundred this month. Use the Coupons-by-date report for an apples-to-apples period comparison. How does HPOS affect coupon usage? WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage keeps coupon lookups in dedicated tables. The Vortex IQ engine reads redemptions through the REST API, so HPOS and legacy stores rank identically. During an in-progress HPOS migration the lookup table can briefly lag, settling once the sync completes. Can I see codes beyond the top few? The bar chart shows the leading codes for readability. To interrogate a specific code’s full history or compare any two codes, use Ask Viq in plain English, it can pull the ranking for any code in your catalogue.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Top Coupons by Usage (30d) is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across WooCommerce and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.