Understanding bot clicks
You will learn
Learn about bot clicks (also known as server-clicks), and why some of the clicks on your emails and SMS messages may not come from a human. Bot clicks can impact your marketing strategy, as profiles may appear to be more engaged than they actually are.
What are bot clicks?
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.
Inbox providers, some 3rd-party security software, and carriers use bots to click links in emails before any human user. This helps the providers protect users from phishing by making sure the links are safe and not a malicious URL.
Bot clicks can impact your marketing because they give a false sense of engagement for a profile. It may appear that a customer clicked the link in an email because they were interested in the content, but in reality, a machine performed the click and the user did not perform the action.
Note that Apple Privacy Opens are a separate concept from bot clicks.
Email bot clicks
Identifying email bot clicks
Within the Clicked Email event in Klaviyo, you can find a piece of event data called Bot Click. The value for this can be set to either true or false based on whether the click was performed by a bot.
Email bot-click event data is only available from January 1, 2022.
Preventing email bot clicks
Dedicated click tracking allows you to display your own domain on click-tracking links (instead of the default Klaviyo encoding).
Dedicated click tracking is beneficial because customers and inbox providers can easily recognize your brand, making the links in your email more trustworthy. Instead of a long string of letters and numbers from a Klaviyo-encoded link (i.e., trk.klaviyomail.com or trk.klclick.com), customers will see your brand’s name when hovering over links in your email. This may increase the chances that they will click on your links and can make links look safer to inbox providers.
In addition to setting up dedicated click tracking, you should avoid linking to external websites and using link shorteners. These can cause email inbox providers to be suspicious of a link and validate its safety with a bot-click.
Lastly, maintaining a strong sender reputation and good overall deliverability shows inbox providers you are a reputable sender and makes them less likely to validate the safety of links in your sends.
There is no way to prevent bot clicks performed by inbox providers entirely. While these methods can make inbox providers less likely to verify the safety of links in your emails through an automated click, this does not guarantee that all bot clicks will be prevented.
SMS bot clicks
SMS messages can also experience bot clicks. The biggest driver of bot clicks in SMS messages is link previewing functionality, which is a standard feature on most iOS and Android devices. In order for the link preview to be generated, devices must programmatically click the link to retrieve the preview image and present it in the user’s messaging app. The logic varies by device and operating system, but it is known to inflate click rates.
Additionally, bot clicks can also originate from carriers and providers that examine message content for compliance.
Identifying SMS-bot clicks
Within the Clicked SMS event in Klaviyo, you can find an event property called Bot Click. The property’s value will be either true or false based on whether the click was performed by a bot.
Impact of bot clicks
Bot clicks do not influence the cost of a campaign and do not impact conversions based on events such as Active on Site, Placed order, etc. However, they can impact attribution if the last click within the attribution window before a conversion is a bot click.
If you suspect you are experiencing high levels of bot clicks with your emails or SMS messages, you can exclude bot clicks from tracking and reporting data or measure engagement using the Active on site rate instead of Click rate. Once a campaign is sent, from the overview page, you can select the conversion metric as the Active on site event to see this data.
Monitoring bot clicks
Segmentation
You can use bot click data as a filter when building segments to either see the number of profiles experiencing bot clicks, or to exclude the clicks to make sure you are only including real clicks performed by humans.
To find profiles with at least 1 human click, add a Clicked Email or Clicked SMS condition set to at least once in your chosen timeframe. Apply the following filter to that condition to exclude bot clicks:
- Where Bot Click equals False
Note that a profile can have a mix of both human and bot clicks. Klaviyo uses a number of different factors to determine whether a click was performed by a bot, and is able to distinguish human and bot clicks from each other. A click performed by a human can be identified with the Bot Click = false event data.
Bot click data in segments is available from January 1, 2022.
Metric reports
To compare email or SMS bot clicks with human clicks in a metric report:
- Open Metrics and select Clicked Email or Clicked SMS. Select the Chart tab.
- Choose the Date range you want to analyze.
- Under Filter, select BY, then select Bot Click. The True group shows bot clicks, and the False group shows clicks identified as human.
Note that a profile can have a mix of both human and bot clicks. Klaviyo uses a number of different factors to determine whether a click was performed by a bot, and is able to distinguish human and bot clicks from each other. A click performed by a human can be identified with the Bot Click = false event data.
Custom reports
Custom reports can be used to find data around bot clicks as well. Create a Single Metric Deep Dive Report to analyze the number of bot clicks for the email or SMS channels.
- Select the Clicked Email or Clicked SMS metric in your single metric deep dive report.
- Add a Bot Click filter. Set it to True to report on bot clicks, or False to exclude bot clicks.
- Click Save & Run Report to generate the results.
Learn how to configure custom reports to track bot clicks.
Excluding bot clicks from attribution and certain reporting data
You can exclude bot clicks from both your account’s reporting data and attribution calculations. This way, your attribution windows for capturing actions align with your reporting data. Learn how to remove bot clicks, Apple Privacy opens, and adjust your attribution windows.
If you previously excluded bot clicks in your email settings, review your selections on the Attribution page to apply the exclusions to both reporting and attribution.
It’s not recommended to turn on the bot click setting while a live campaign or fixed date flow experiment is running.
- Open the account menu, then select Settings > Attribution.
- Under Tracking and reporting data, select Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Email, Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Text Message, or both.
- Click Save.
Changes can take up to 36 hours to apply to historical attribution data. You cannot edit attribution settings again while the update is processing.
Impact of bot click feature on reporting
Once you enable the bot click feature, it will affect different areas of Klaviyo reporting or allow you further filtering capabilities. Additionally, some reporting will still include bot clicks regardless of the feature. Read more below about the specific impact per reporting surface.
Metrics
The bot click reporting filter impacts how the following metrics on your account are calculated:
- Click Rate
- Total Clicks
- Unique Clicks
Excluding bot clicks from attribution can also change attributed conversions and revenue. It does not remove the underlying purchase events.
Reporting
With the bot click reporting feature enabled, the following reports and dashboards exclude bot clicks from click rates and counts:
- Applicable cards in the Overview dashboards
- Flow performance reporting (from within a specific flow)
- Campaign performance reporting (from within a specific campaign)
- Email campaigns trend report
- SMS dashboard
- SMS and email benchmarks
These reports will be updated retroactively to exclude bot clicks from January 1, 2022.
The bot click reporting filter does not apply to:
Single metric deep dive reports include bot clicks unless you add the Bot Click = false filter. Campaign and flow performance custom reports follow your account’s bot click reporting setting.
Benchmarks
The bot click reporting filter impacts the values you see in email and SMS benchmarks. Click rates in benchmark reporting will align with your setting selection as of May 2024 and include the previous month’s data.
Historical benchmarks before January 1, 2022 are not impacted by the bot click reporting filter at this time.
Experiments
If you are running A/B tests with Click Rate as a metric for your experiment, the bot click reporting filter can impact your results. The next time any live experiments are evaluated, only human clicks are used to evaluate the winner and bot clicks are excluded. This may cause a shift in the winning variation. Historical winners will not change and the winner was decided based on the data available at the time.
Analyzing campaign A/B test results
It is important to note that the Continuous results and Test results pages for campaign A/B tests behave differently in regards to bot clicks.
The Continuous results page only shows in campaign A/B tests on less than 100% of the population (i.e. the winner is sent to the remaining recipients).
The Continuous results page always shows the click rates in adherence to your current bot click setting selection.
For example if you are currently excluding bot clicks from reporting, you may see the following results on the Continuous results page:
- Variation A = 3% click rate (winner)
- Variation B = 5% click rate
Variation A remains the winner selected during the test, even though its click rate is now lower on the Continuous results page. Changing the bot click setting does not select a new winner for a completed test.
Meanwhile, the Test results page always shows the click rate based on your definition at the time that the winner was selected.
For example, if bot clicks were included in reporting at the time the winner was selected, the Test results page may have the following results:
- Variation A = 15% click rate (winner)
- Variation B = 14% click rate
Because of the differences in behavior between the Continuous results and Test results pages, you may see conflicting results and the variation with a lower click rate declared the winner on the Continuous results page.
Attribution
When you exclude bot clicks in Attribution settings, those clicks are not used to attribute conversions to email or text messages. A conversion can still be attributed through another eligible interaction within its attribution window. Excluding a bot click changes how a conversion is credited; it does not remove a recorded purchase.
Additional resources
- Understanding email deliverability
Learn about email deliverability, including the steps you can take to establish a strong sender reputation so that your emails are delivered to the inbox.
- How to increase email click rates
Learn what potential reasons for this decrease may be and how to boost your click rates. Click rates allow you to measure engagement, granting you insight into how often recipients click the links you send. There are a variety of reasons why click rate may decline over time as you send campaigns and flows.