Spike in open + click rates for hotmail

  • 20 May 2024
  • 8 replies
  • 1114 views

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Anyone else notice a surge in open and click rate for hotmail yesterday?

 

Like 70 to 90% on both click and opens.

 

Any ideas as to why? We saw this across many of our accounts yesterday

kaila.lawrence 1 month ago

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!

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8 replies

I’m seeing this too.

Userlevel 5
Badge +18

Hey @Boyuan at PLTHORA @jennifersquires ,

It’s unclear unless you hae changed anything in your sending pattern but what it looks like that microsoft is cycling through senders and even good senders are seeing this behavior from them. Could be behavior related or if it's just them training their AI or something.

Even, O365 also noticed the same behavior. I guess there’s something about their mail or behaviour that triggers the sudden interest.

I’d say don’t panic and keep monitoring the metrics.

Badge +3

I saw this, too. 

It may only be happening with my plain text campaigns. Is that what you’re seeing too @Boyuan at PLTHORA and @angie.macc?

Badge +1

I have been experiencing this as well, all of a sudden our click rates went up about 10%. I checked and it is hotmail’s domain that suddenly has almost 100% open and click rates on these campaigns. 

 

This has not just been for plain text campaigns and there have been some campaigns that have not had this boost. I had two in a row that had a sudden spike, two that had normal open and click rates, and now our latest campaign has another spike. 

Badge

 

I have been experiencing this as well, all of a sudden our click rates went up about 10%. I checked and it is hotmail’s domain that suddenly has almost 100% open and click rates on these campaigns. 

 

This has not just been for plain text campaigns and there have been some campaigns that have not had this boost. I had two in a row that had a sudden spike, two that had normal open and click rates, and now our latest campaign has another spike. 

Same thing happening here with one of my clients. I noticed the spike in open/click rates was due to Outlook.

When I decided to send emails to Hotmail subscribers separately, the open and click rates shot up to 100%. It’s crazy. 

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Yesterday campaign. What’s going on??

 

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +30

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!

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