In the last few months you may have heard rumblings of click rates decreasing. We’ve seen it across accounts: click rates suddenly dropping with no explanation. This can be alarming for marketers, especially with click rate being a key indicator of email performance and account health.

In reality, we have learned that bot clicks increased at the beginning of the year and have dropped off over recent months, making click rates appear to have declined suddenly.

What Are Bot Clicks?

According to Klaviyo, “a bot click refers to an email or SMS click performed by a machine, often to verify the safety of a link or display a link preview”. When an email is sent from Klaviyo to an inbox provider, the inbox provider or some 3rd-party security softwares may go into the email and “click” the email links to ensure that they aren’t malicious URLs.

Within Klaviyo, these clicks will appear as if the person receiving the email has clicked, skewing performance metrics. Until recently there was no way to decipher real from bot clicks.

What’s Changed?

While bot clicks have always existed, they have been too minimal to impact performance. However, earlier this year these clicks increased significantly for most email providers, resulting in dramatically increased, artificially inflated click rates.

With that trend reversing over the past few months, some marketers have worried their performance is declining without realizing the impact of bot clicks. Fortunately, though, these clicks can now be removed from all reporting data via a new beta feature within Klaviyo. Now, we can determine exactly how much bot clicks have impacted performance metrics, and what the “true” click rate has been for accounts.

In the example below, one account that we analyzed saw the campaign click rate was 118% higher on average when including bot clicks compared to the true click rate excluding that bot engagement. In June, we can see bot activity peaked with a 420% higher campaign click rate and a 130% higher flow click rate compared to reports excluding bot clicks. Despite what the unfiltered data suggested, engagement rates were actually lower in June compared to the YTD averages. Without enabling this feature to exclude bot engagement from reporting, this brand might otherwise have wondered why campaigns yielded peak engagement rates with lower than average revenue that month.

Exclude bot clicks from Email and SMS Reporting with Klaviyo’s new beta feature. Here’s how to view your brand’s true click rates:

Enable Klaviyo’s New Beta Feature

Removing bot clicks from your reporting is super simple, you’ll just need to make an adjustment to Klaviyo settings:

• In Klaviyo, navigate to “Settings” by clicking the account name in the bottom left corner.
• Once in “Settings”, click → “Email” → “Tracking”.
• Check the box to “Exclude bot clicks from reporting data” and refresh Klaviyo.

It’s important to note that this feature will only remove bot clicks from click reporting, but not from attribution. If you’d like to remove bot clicks from attribution as well, you’ll need to toggle on an additional feature within your attribution settings in Klaviyo (see image below). Note that toggling this on or off will not make any retroactive changes to past reporting— changing this setting will only impact future reporting.

Need help assessing how bot clicks have impacted your Email & SMS Marketing? We’re here to help.

Get in touch.

Q4 is off to an exciting start with Google introducing a fundamental shift in how Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns battle for attention within the ad auction. This promises to bring greater balance and transparency to the auction process, while demanding a more nuanced approach to campaign management. (image source: Google)

Performance Max No Longer Prioritized Over Standard Shopping

Historically, PMax campaigns have enjoyed preferential treatment, often outranking Standard Shopping campaigns in the ad auction hierarchy. This created an uneven playing field for advertisers relying on Standard Shopping campaigns.

As of October 2024, Google will gradually release an update to level the auction priority playing field between Standard Shopping and Performance Max campaigns targeting the same product.

Ad Rank and Product Prioritization is the New Deciding Factor

The ad with the highest Ad Rank will be the one displayed, regardless of whether it originates from a PMax or Standard Shopping campaign.

Google calculates the Ad Rank for each eligible product in real time to determine the position in the search results. Ad Rank is influenced by several factors:

• Bid: The maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad.
• Data quality: How complete and accurate your product data is (titles, descriptions, GTINs, images, etc.)
• Product relevance: How closely your product data matches the user’s search query.
• Predicted click-through rate (CTR): Google’s estimate of how likely someone is to click on your ad based on historical performance and feed optimization.
• Cost: When a user clicks on your ad, you pay a cost-per-click (CPC). The actual CPC is often less than your maximum bid and is influenced by the Ad Rank of the product below yours in the auction.

Happy Q4! We’re here to share some digital tips & tricks to help you put the finishing touches on your plans for a smooth sailing, brand scaling Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend.

Shoppers are estimated to spend $10 billion on Black Friday in 2024, up from $9.8 billion in 2023, with 42% of consumers planning to shop online. Still though, inflation and interest rates have put many people on a budget in 2024. It is reasonable to expect, especially with crowded markets and platforms, that consumers will be more selective about which brands they shop from.

That makes your BFCM prep even more crucial as consumers want to consider and plan their purchases. Almost 60% of shoppers start their holiday shopping in October or November, and 44% plan their BFCM purchases more than a week in advance.

Here’s what we think you should do about it.

1. Start Early

Ideally, you already have this part of the plan in motion or complete.

Map out your campaign strategy, goals, and budgets so that you can start capturing your buyers’ attention with increased spend on top-of-funnel campaigns throughout October. Lock your promotion in as well so that you’re able to source and design the necessary content in advance.

Depending on the contrast between your BAU and BFCM budgets, it may help to start scaling in increments before the sale starts. For example, one jewelry brand partnering with Lunar Solar Group scales their daily Meta spend by a whopping 7,400% on Black Friday compared to their typical budget. If they tried increasing spend by that amount overnight, not only would the account likely be unable to hit our desired budgets, but the delivery and ROAS would be pretty poor.

Also with Meta ads, wherever it makes sense to do so, have your ads built out in campaigns that are ready to turn on several days before you plan to launch your sale. With the spike in advertising around BFCM, platform review periods can lengthen. You want ads ready to be delivered when your sale launches, not stuck in a review period. In cases where you’re leveraging existing campaigns, consider implementing additional QA checkpoints within your team to avoid setting sale material live sooner than intended.

As far as when to launch the deals themselves, starting early can be very helpful here too as we know the bulk of 2024 sales are set to begin in early November; Walmart’s 2023 sale began on November 8th and Amazon started offering Black Friday deals on November 17, 2023. If margins allow, launching a lower tier “early sale” within the first two weeks of November can help put you on customers’ radars ahead of (or at least alongside) your competitors. However, that’s not feasible, or necessary, for every brand. From a platform perspective, it does certainly help to allow ads to run for several days building social proof before they reach peak efficiency, so being able to launch your offer prior to Black Friday can be an advantage for paid ads.

2. Grow Your Audience Before The Sale Begins

Drive as much traffic and as many email/SMS signups as possible in the months and weeks leading up to BFCM. That way, you’ll have a larger pool of potential customers to retarget when sales kick off. Remember that almost half of shoppers are planning their purchases now, so this is the time to get consumers familiar with your brand, putting them in the consideration phase.

Some examples of this prep work include:

• Optimizing your website pop-ups to increase sign up rates.
• Investing in list building tactics such as lead generation and tools like HiTide that turn social engagement into SMS subscriptions.
• Leveraging influencers to create unique content and generate awareness with their audiences ahead of time.
• Making organic content extra engaging with seasonally relevant material, polls that invoke user responses, interactive contests, etc.
• Tapping into affiliate marketing that can put you on ‘Best Holiday Gifts of 2024’ lists.

3. Optimize Your Site

This should go without saying at this point, but optimize for mobile, and fix any issues creating a slow site speed before the big weekend. To really fine-tune your conversion rates and create a customer experience that encourages brand loyalty, you should also be sure to:

• Set your Buy Boxes to default to a subscription option
• A/B test headlines and CTAs
• Keep your value props clear and prioritized according to customer pain points
• Test your discount functionality in advance
• Bonus points if you can leverage dynamic customization on your site

Keep in mind that during the holiday season especially, consumers care about shipping times and costs, so be sure to emphasize that as well throughout the shopping experience.

4. Creative

Consumers are going to be getting A LOT of ads and emails over BFCM. Come prepared with data-backed decisions.

• Make eye-catching creatives that stick out with the brand identity, the product, and the offer. If you’re having a hard time taking a step back and viewing material with a consumer mindset, consider using tools like Neurons that will scan creative and tell you where attention is being drawn to.
• Create urgency. Language like, “Sold Out 10 Times”, “Limited Edition”, and “First 200 Customers Only”, can drive demand. Countdown clock visuals are also great for this.
• Messaging should feature a balanced mix of brand values and enticing offers. Match the audience’s needs with your USPs.
• Clarity wins. It’s good to be prepared with a variety of asset types, but come prepared with some uncomplicated graphics that clearly show the offer.
• Learn from past campaign performance to understand what worked and what didn’t. Shockingly, we tend to find that leaning into seasonality with gifting visuals goes a long way.
• Refresh evergreen ad creative in November. It’s easy to get caught up in the sale prep and neglect evergreen efforts, but these ads are likely to drive a healthy chunk of your platform revenue over BFCM if you let them.