Our click rates unexpectedly spiked to 13-15%, with an open rate of 60%. We suspected bot activity, so in the following email, we hid a tiny dot and a small piece of text at the bottom, linking to it in the hopes of identifying and suppressing bot interactions. After reviewing the clicks, the email addresses seem legitimate, with some subscribers dating back two years.
I contacted Klaviyo support but it looks like there's no current way to complete prevent bot activity in emails.
We're still considering hiding a link within out emails that only bots would click in our next campaigns. This would allow us to segment those bots out and avoid sending future emails to them.
However, we're concerned about two things:
Could this approach accidentally block real subscribers whose email accounts are sometimes accessed by bots?
Even if a bot interacts with a subscriber's email, would the subscriber themselves still be able to see our emails?
We also noticed a significant increase in bot activity following the recent updates from Google and Yahoo. Could there be a connection between these events?
We'd appreciate any insights you can offer on these concerns.
Best answer by kaila.lawrence
Hi friends! Jumping in to add some context from the Support team on this. Since mid January, Klaviyo has been receiving a higher than normal volume of reports of elevated click rates from a handful of our customer’s email sends. While it is normal for some sends to have an elevation of click rates due to suspected bot activity, the volume of activity has been more substantial than would be expected.
While you are experiencing this activity on Klaviyo, it’s very important to understand that these clicks are not controlled by Klaviyo. The clicks are happening, and thus are recorded by our click tracking. This is not an instance where Klaviyo is recording phantom activity of any kind. For some time Klaviyo has been working on a means by which we can reduce the volume of non-human clicks that Klaviyo presents in our email analytics. That work has accelerated due to this rise in activity. Klaviyo is actively assessing several methods to reliably identify email bot clicks. Any method we use will require extensive testing to prevent inadvertent filtering of legitimate human clicks. This is to say, any type of proposed mitigation of suspected bot clicks is still going to take some time to release.
Additionally, the Support team suggested as an immediate stopgap moving to dedicated click tracking with SSL could help reduce (but not eliminate) elevated bot clicks. This is not assured as it has not been extensively tested, however this could help to mitigate the effect of these clicks on your sends. All in all, unfortunately this is an industry problem and not something specific to Klaviyo. But, our team is on it and working on cooking up new features to help with this moving forward!
Here is a useful article describing how to identify bot clicks:
Hey there - we actually just discovered something similiar. Can see in GA4 and full story that there has been a spike in bot traffic to the site with UTM source ‘email’. Looking at the days campaign activity & clicks, we see a ton of users with 0 opens and 20 / 30 / 100 clicks that all have “bot click = true” in the payload. Further investigating these users we see they all have lifetime values - they are known customers with history dating back years in some cases. I can’t find any consistencies across the users - i.e. domain, browser, client os, client family etc.
Anyone else having the same issue?
Waiting on support to weigh in but I’m afraid this has been a long standing issue that hasn’t been caught because kpi’s like open and clicks have been down-trending for months, and deliverability and bounces have always been on par. (Known user with bot clicks doesn’t results in soft or hard bounces.)
Hi friends! Jumping in to add some context from the Support team on this. Since mid January, Klaviyo has been receiving a higher than normal volume of reports of elevated click rates from a handful of our customer’s email sends. While it is normal for some sends to have an elevation of click rates due to suspected bot activity, the volume of activity has been more substantial than would be expected.
While you are experiencing this activity on Klaviyo, it’s very important to understand that these clicks are not controlled by Klaviyo. The clicks are happening, and thus are recorded by our click tracking. This is not an instance where Klaviyo is recording phantom activity of any kind. For some time Klaviyo has been working on a means by which we can reduce the volume of non-human clicks that Klaviyo presents in our email analytics. That work has accelerated due to this rise in activity. Klaviyo is actively assessing several methods to reliably identify email bot clicks. Any method we use will require extensive testing to prevent inadvertent filtering of legitimate human clicks. This is to say, any type of proposed mitigation of suspected bot clicks is still going to take some time to release.
Additionally, the Support team suggested as an immediate stopgap moving to dedicated click tracking with SSL could help reduce (but not eliminate) elevated bot clicks. This is not assured as it has not been extensively tested, however this could help to mitigate the effect of these clicks on your sends. All in all, unfortunately this is an industry problem and not something specific to Klaviyo. But, our team is on it and working on cooking up new features to help with this moving forward!
Here is a useful article describing how to identify bot clicks:
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