Avoid bot-inflated email metrics

Stop tracking email open rates. 🛑 Lots of talk about Gmails new banner blocking auto image downloads recently however this is not a new problem. Optimising campaigns for open rates is worse than a vanity exercise - it’s misleading and unreliable. Here’s why… Open tracking relies on an invisible image (a tracking pixel) embedded in your email. When the email is opened, the image loads, logging the open… But it’s not that simple. That pixel can also collect data like IP addresses, locations, and browser details, raising significant privacy concerns. As a result, major players like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have taken action to protect user privacy. Let’s take Gmail as an example: Since the introduction of Google’s privacy measures, reported open rates have been significantly inflated. Many of these “opens” are triggered by Google’s servers rather than genuine recipient engagement. Check out the data 📈 Chart 1: Compares open rates for Gmail against other providers like Microsoft and Proofpoint. Notably, Gmail’s open rates have consistently been higher, with a significant spike after 2018. Chart 2: Focuses on “first-minute opens” likely caused by image preloading or security scanning. Data suggests that 15-20% of emails sent to Gmail/GSuite recipients are false opens, a trend since 2018. The takeaway? Open rates are a relic. They’re inflated, unreliable and can mislead your outbound strategy. Instead, focus on metrics that reflect genuine engagement: ✅ Click-through rates  ✅ Responses ✅ Actual engagement In email prospecting, not all that glitters is gold—some of it is just glitter. Full stats breakdown link in the comments #outbound #B2Bsales #prospecting

Looking to filter bot traffic from analytics reports? Start with your email channel. Why email? Because it attracts a lot of hidden bot activity, inflating most metrics like CTR and on-site engagement. When you send your newsletter emails, major email providers automatically scan the links in your email for malicious content as soon as they hit users' inboxes. These scans don’t stop at the links in your email—they also follow and scan any links found on the pages those links lead to. As a result, a single link click could generate as many as 10 pageviews in your analytics. The challenge is that most of these bots don't reveal their identity. They mimic normal user behavior, using standard user agents and performing actions like scrolling through pages or clicking buttons. This makes it difficult for Google Analytics to filter them out automatically. So, how can you exclude this bot traffic? Since bots don’t label themselves, it can be challenging. Here are 2 approaches: 1- IP Blocking:  One of the most common sources of bot traffic is Microsoft Safe Links, luckily they provide a list of IP addresses used by Outlook 365. You can blacklist these IPs in your analytics reports. You could also find some of these IPs using your server logs or ask your developer for them. 2- Honeypot Trap: Another method is setting up a honeypot. A common technique involves adding a hidden link in your email footer that real users won’t click, but bots will. Any traffic associated with this link can be excluded from your reports, or even challenged with a CDN like Cloudflare. Do you use any different approach?

Exposing shady Klaviyo agency practices, part 2. Last time I made a post like this I got a few messages from angry agency owners whose clients sent them my post. They were doing shady stuff, and their clients found out. So here's another 😉 Brand operators, if you obsess over % of revenue attributed to Klaviyo, here’s what tends to happen when you work with an agency: 🚩 They’ll tweak your attribution windows (e.g. 5-day open, 5-day click) so Klaviyo gets more credit. They’ll count bot clicks/opens as revenue (more on that below). 🚩 They’ll send more emails and flows to trigger those bot interactions or to catch buyers already on a path to purchase. If an agency suggests a 20-email welcome flow or daily sends without testing... run. 🚩 They’ll push for higher discount code percentages. 🚩 If your TOF acquisition slows down and they’ve layered in the above tactics, your % of revenue from email might spike, while your actual revenue stays flat or declines. Here’s the thing: inbox providers are now auto-opening and clicking emails using bots to check for spam and fraud. Klaviyo often counts those interactions as real unless properly filtered. This is a major flaw, and the industry’s still catching up. Agencies are taking advantage of this grey area to screw over brands. I see it every day. Email has always been part art, part science. You need to track a few key metrics overtime, while also monitoring the look, feel and function of your emails. Ask qualitative questions like: - Are we educating people about our products in an interesting way? - Are emails arriving at the right moments in the customer journey? - Are we clearing our ads funnel regularly? - The list goes on. The combo of directional data and qualitative content reviews will tell you if you're truly headed in the right direction. When someone asks me on a discovery call, “What’s a good % of revenue from Klaviyo?”, what I really want to say is: Who cares? I usually try to explain all this, but it’s a lot for one call. At Bedford, we’re not chasing vanity metrics or short-term sales spikes. We’re building email programs that grow and evolve with your brand overtime. A lot of agency owners tell me I'm an idiot for leaking content like this. That I'm too virtuous and that growth at all costs is more important. I wonder what David Ogilvy would say to them 😉 If you want to work with a retention agency serious about long-term results, shoot me a DM or email.

Open rates are a complete vanity metric. I’m more convinced of this now than ever. Why? I recently sent out a marketing email to 1000s of recipients and noticed a 25% open rate just seconds after sending. What’s happening here? Did the 25% happen to be checking email at that exact moment? Are 25% of subs sitting on pins and needles for my next email masterpiece? I think not. What’s actually going on is almost certainly bots and filters. Those come in the following flavors: Tracking pixel refresh by security/Gmail proxies ↳ Gmail image proxy and Apple Privacy Protection auto-load images (aka those 1x1 pixels to track opens) as soon as emails are delivered. Corporate scanners and antivirus solutions ↳ Products like Mimecast sandbox every link and scan every pixel immediately to check for threats. Those checks register as opens and clicks. This is an easy one to detect by looking at opens—“Whoa! Satya Nadella just opened my email! Oh, wait… nvm.” What to do about it? In short, there’s not much to do to uncover your real open rate. HubSpot has bot filtering, which helps. We use HubSpot and have bot filtering turned on and still get that immediate 25% open rate, so obviously there’s bots or filtering tools still sneaking through. Instead of using open rates, we use the following metrics: 🌐 Site visits Most emails drive to our website. With Common Room, we can see who was sent an email, if they visited our site, which pages were visited, and how much time was spent. ✅ The actual intended conversion We send a good amount of emails that drive to a conversion event like a video view, RSVP for a webinar, filling out a survey, etc. Obvious point here, but it’s better to measure performance by the end objective instead of claiming a win on open rates. 🧪 Email performance formula Alan Harris, my email marketing guru, developed a formula that we used to measure email performance at Segment. I don’t recall the exact details, but it was something like the ratio of clicks to unsubscribes, and anything over 3:1 was considered pretty solid. Anywho, a proxy like this is not a bad idea if you want to get fancy with it.

Stop tracking email open rates, they’re misleading. Whether you’re sending thousands of automated emails or 20 hand-crafted ones a day, focus on one metric: replies. Not opens. Not clicks. Actual human replies, positive or negative. Here’s why: Google updates, advanced spam filters, and company security measures are making email tracking unreliable. For example, an email might show as “opened,” but it was actually a bot scanning it as part of a security protocol. You might see a 70% open rate and think, “This is great!” But if no one’s replying, it’s meaningless. Even clicks can be misleading. Instead, measure success by how many real conversations you’re starting. If you send 100 emails and get 10 genuine replies, that’s the metric to focus on. It’s not about how many people enter the funnel at the top, it’s about the quality of what comes out at the end. Next time you review an email campaign, ignore the flashy numbers and focus on what matters: replies. Hope this helps! ___ I’m Patrick Collins, Startup Sales Coach with 13+ years of helping startups build sales systems that drive real growth. 🔔 Subscribe to The Relationship of Sales for actionable strategies, tools, and lessons to scale smarter and faster.

Did you know your Klaviyo account is overreporting CTR & sales from bot clicks? Here's how to fix it 👇 1. Open Analytics & Click on Custom Reports 2. Tap on Create From Scratch 3. Select Single Metric & Chose "Click Email" as the metric 4. Click on "Add Filter" and change it to “Clicked Bot” and set it to “is false.” 5. Save the Report and now you'll only see real clicks in the report 6. If you need to analyze the data further, export the report. Click the “Export” button and choose your preferred format (CSV, Excel, etc.). 7. Cross-check with Campaign Data Go to the “Campaigns” tab. Select a specific campaign you want to analyze. Use the report you’ve created to cross-check the real clicks against the total clicks in the campaign. 8. Automate the Process To automate this process for future campaigns, set up a recurring report. Go to the “Reports” tab, select your saved report, and click on “Schedule Report.” Choose how often you want the report to be generated and emailed to you (daily, weekly, monthly). Hope this helps & now you're able to eliminate bot clicks

Stop tracking open and click rates—immediately. Most people don’t realize this, but tracking these metrics is doing more harm than good. Here’s why: 1️⃣ Opens are misleading. They rely on an invisible pixel, and email providers like Gmail and Outlook see this as a privacy invasion. The result? Your emails land in spam or promotions. 2️⃣ Click tracking damages trust. When you modify URLs with redirects, spam filters flag them as suspicious—especially in cold outreach. 3️⃣ Bots inflate your metrics. Security bots often "open" emails and click links before real people do. Up to 75% of open rates can be false. 4️⃣ Tracking makes you look like a marketer. Email providers favor authentic conversations—not mass outreach stuffed with tracking pixels. What to do instead: Limit aggressive tracking—remove unnecessary tracking links. Focus on content quality—write simple, text-based emails that feel personal. Authenticate your domain—set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to improve trust. Encourage replies, not clicks—conversations improve sender reputation. Send in small batches—test deliverability before scaling (Instantly.ai helps you do it easily). Forget vanity metrics. Focus on what actually matters: landing in the inbox and starting real conversations. P.S. Video taken from Instantly.ai.

I was on a sales call the other day... Seems a lot of people STILL aren't solving for inflated metrics in Klaviyo. I noticed this client had an 80% open rate... So I pointed it out. They responded along the lines of: "our team’s been killing it with A/B testing". If only it were that simple 😂 Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and bot clicks have been inflating the numbers for months. Vanity metrics gone crazy. But it seems some still aren't aware. And luckily Klaviyo released a solution to keep your data clean. 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 -> 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 👇 ✅ 𝑬𝒙𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒕 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑪𝒍𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅 𝑬𝒎𝒂𝒊𝒍: excludes fake activity from email security software. Drives cleaner click data. ✅ 𝑬𝒙𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒕 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑪𝒍𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅 𝑺𝑴𝑺: same principle as email but targeted at mobile devices. ✅ 𝑬𝒙𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝑨𝒑𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝑴𝑷𝑷 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒂: Mail Privacy Protection preloads images & tracking pixels. You'll often get opens even if a recipient hasn't interacted (artificially driving rates ⬆️). 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫? 👇 Imagine spending your marketing budget and creative energy thinking 80% of your audience is engaged, when in reality, half of them aren’t even seeing your emails. Many will be aware of this. Some clearly still aren't. So I'm flagging it to avoid data distortion! Tick these options. Get real data. Make real decisions 🤝 Hope this helps someone! ---------- Have you checked these settings already?

Do your click rates seem exceptionally high? The culprit is: Bot clicks. Here’s the TLDR For the past few weeks we’ve been seeing super high click rates across different clients and ESPs I’m talking about a dreamy 21% I wish our content was that good but the real reason is bot clicks Inbox providers are using bots to click links in emails in order to ensure they are safe and not a malicious URL While this is great it can also give you a false sense of engagement You think: “Wow, my content rocks” while the link was clicked by a bot and not a human How do you know whether bots are clicking your emails or humans? 1 - Have your click rates spiked suddenly? 2 - Within the clicked email metric in Klaviyo does it say “bot click: true”? 3 - Check the volume of bot clicks in the Klaviyo clicks metrics tab What do you do now? 4 - You can email Klaviyo support and they will give you beta access to exclude bot clicks within tracking and for segmentation. This will allow you to get cleaner data and build better segments 5 - Set up dedicated click tracking: This will make links show your brand name vs. klaviyo and can increase trust as customers will see your brand’s name when hovering over links in your email. This increases the chances that they will click on your links, and makes links look safer in the eyes of inbox providers. Last but not least, as always, be a good sender and follow deliverability best practices. A strong sender reputation makes inbox providers less likely to validate the safety of links in your sends through bot-clicks.

Half of your "most engaged" email subscribers don't actually exist. They appear in your metrics as your best subscribers... >> Consistent opens >> Frequent clicks But they're just bots, automatic openers, and non-human interactions. And they're completely distorting your email marketing reality. Here's what's really happening: >> iOS/Apple Mail users show as "opens" regardless of actual engagement >> B2B security tools automatically click your links to scan for threats >> Your "highly engaged" segments are heavily contaminated with fake activity >> Your re-engagement campaigns are targeting people who never saw your emails And... you're making critical business decisions based on these phantom metrics. Imagine having crystal-clear visibility into who's actually engaging with your emails. Picture making decisions based on real human behavior instead of bot activity. Think about how much more effective your email marketing would be if you could separate the signal from the noise. Here's a simple test to identify bot clicks: 1) Create an invisible link in your email footer by bolding and underlinking a period or number that no human would notice. 2) Tag anyone who clicks it as "probable bot engagement" and remove them from your "highly engaged" segments. 3) Then, start rebuilding your email strategy based on genuine human connection, not algorithmic ghosts. This is just ONE of the things Lyndsay Phillips - Podcast Leverage/Repurposing🎙️ and I chatted about on our recent podcast. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gWTJCMHD