Bot Clicks: How To Reduce Their Impact on Your Lifecycle Marketing
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.
