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Inflated click rates?

  • 14 February 2024
  • 20 replies
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Is anyone else experiencing massively inflated click rates? We started noticing it from about 2 weeks ago to now, and it’s showing an over 200% increase to our monthly click rate averages. When looking at individual campaigns as well, they’re also looking to be incredibly higher. Does anyone know if this is just a Klaviyo issue being worked through or what else would be causing this?

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Best answer by kaila.lawrence 21 June 2024, 20:16

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Hey @jordvega! There isn’t a technical issue here on the platform side, but let’s see what we can tease out:

  • Has your campaign content or segmentation strategy changed? 
  • Is this happening on ALL your campaigns, or only some? Which ones?
  • Have any other metrics been affected, or only clicks?
  • Have you connected any new integrations to Klaviyo?
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We are having the same issue, starting January 23/24

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All campaigns, only clicks

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Hiya @christya! Same questions to you… usually the reason is a combination of things including an increase in subscribers, decrease in spam/bounce rates, changes in campaign content and strategies. All in all, an increase in clicks is a good thing and means your marketing is working! I’d suggest also looking into what your subscribers are clicking on and subsequently how that’s impacting your conversions. 

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Unfortunately I don’t think that is the case.  The clicks tripled overnight on January 23.  We are having issues with our data layer other than this also starting on Jan. 23, but of course, it could be unrelated.

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I should have also noted, there is no increase in conversions, so marketing not working.  Definitely something else happening with the data.

 

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@christya Hmm… In this case I suggest reaching out to Support for further investigation. They’ll be able to dig into this deeper!

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After further internal analysis, we are almost certain this is related to an update from Apple affecting .iCloud addresses.  See below:

 

I did a quick clicks comparison between those top three domains (they represent a decent chunk of our clicks) and found that iCloud had the biggest difference in click data (comparing Feb 1st to the 15th vs Jan 1st to the 15th). Icloud saw 682% increase in clicks MTD.

 

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That’s wild! Keep us updated on what more you find out.

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I am experiencing the same issue as @jordvega and @christya. Clicks doubled overnight on January 19 (with no increase in conversions), and have remained extremely inflated ever since.

 

Like @christya , we saw the biggest difference in click data from icloud.com and me.com domains.

 

This is of great concern to our team and I would be very eager to learn how we can resolve this issue and gain more accurate insight into campaign performance. 

@christya @jordvega @allisondial I am having the exact same issue. Was anyone able to identify a cause or any type of solution to avoid artificially inflated reports?

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Hey friends, I’m checking internally on this and will let you know what I find out. In the meantime, please keep the thread updated on anything you discover as well!

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Hi everyone,
I’m also experiencing this issue where my clicks are higher than my recipients. Here’s what the Klaviyo support team has mentioned: 

“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.”

So far I haven’t heard from them for any updates on this issue and have to manually calculate my CTR. 

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Yes, thank you! I was told the same thing as well. 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!

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I am still having this similar issue now 2 months later. Has a solution been found or any new tricks to use in the meantime?  

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I've noticed some email domains are more prone to “automatic clicks on all links within the email” than others.

I have been running my custom Campaign Performance and Flow Performance reports grouped by Inbox Provider. There are a lot of domains that seem to show artificially inflated click rates, but many of them represent such a small portion of subscribers. Instead of weeding all of those inbox providers out individually, I am looking only at the top 5 inbox providers which make up about 94% of my received emails. Among those top 5, Apple is the only obvious outlier, so I am excluding Apple and using the remaining “top 4” as a representative sample to calculate average engagement metrics.

 

It is a huge pain so if anyone has a better way, I am very open to ideas!

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Hi Community,

 

It seems something trigger bot clicks in the campaigns as it show big spike in this activity form week to week. This is form one shopify store but today the spike was to all shopify stores we have.

This totally messed up the engagement segmentation and communication strategy, is there any solution to not trigger that behaviour?

 

 

Hi - I just noticed a doubling of click through rates for two of the accounts I managed. In addition I had recently noticed in one of the accounts that we have gotten an increase of fake email sign ups. I created a segment to filter these emails out and am not emailing them, but now the issue has migrated to click through rates, or so it seems. Any updates on this issue?

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Hi friends! Jumping in here again to reiterate this is a known industry problem the product team is actively working on solutions for. You have a few options in the meantime:

  • An immediate stopgap is 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.
  • To help you monitor the size of the potential audience, create a segment where “Has clicked email at least once in last X time" with an additional filter where Bot Click = true. 
    • Alternatively, you can also add the “Bot click = false” filter to your engaged segment in order to maintain your deliverability. 

Here’s some more information on this topic:

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