Hey friends! Jumping here to add some context. 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!