Understanding Bot Activity in Email Analytics

Many brands are making decisions based on fake email data (and don't know it).   Here's a simple Klaviyo setting that 90% of brands ignore:   Excluding bot interactions from attribution.   I've been implementing this across all my clients lately, and it's a best practice that most brands just... don't do.   Here's the problem:   Bots are clicking your emails and SMS messages.   Not real customers. Bots.   This inflates your attribution and makes you think email is performing better than it actually is.   Maybe it's competitors checking out your campaigns. Maybe it's automated tools crawling your content. Maybe it's spam filters testing links.   The fix is dead simple:   Go into Klaviyo attribution settings → exclude bot interactions from clicked email and SMS metrics.   That's it.   Now your revenue attribution reflects actual human behavior.   The difference might be small (1-2% in most cases, some as high as 5%), but the principle is huge:   Make decisions based on real data, not inflated metrics.   Your attribution should show you where real customers are actually engaging and buying.   If you're using Klaviyo and haven't done this yet, do it today.   It takes 30 seconds and gives you cleaner, more accurate performance data.

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?

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