Filtering Out Bot Clicks in Klaviyo

Bot clicks have become an increasingly prevalent issue in email marketing, inflating key performance metrics like click rates and open rates. In this tutorial, I’ll define what bot clicks are, explain their impact on your metrics, and provide step-by-step instructions to filter them out on Klaviyo.

What are Bot Clicks?

Bot clicks occur when automated scripts, or "bots," interact with your email campaigns. These bots can artificially inflate metrics such as click rates and open rates, making your email performance appear better than it actually is. This inflation can skew other metrics, such as:

Placed Order Rate: Bots do not make purchases, so a high click or open rate due to bots without corresponding orders can mislead your performance analysis (aka tank your placed order rate, or other conversion rate metrics.)

Engagement Metrics: Inflated click and open rates can lead to incorrect assumptions about your audience's engagement levels.

A/B Testing Results: Bot activity can distort the outcomes of A/B tests, leading to inaccurate conclusions.

By filtering out these bot-clicks, you can gain a more accurate understanding of your email marketing performance. These bots skew some performance metrics way up, and some way down.

If your email marketing has been infiltrated by the pesky bots like mine has, here’s 2 easy things that will significantly help reduce the inflated metrics and keep them from receiving your emails.

Filtering Bot Clicks in Klaviyo Flows

To filter out bot clicks in your flows, apply specific flow filters. While these filters won't capture 100% of bot clicks, they will help exclude a lot of them while still allowing new subscribers and genuine clicks into your flow.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Go to the "Flows" tab in your Klaviyo account and select the flow you want to filter. In the profile filters, apply the following logic. Don’t forget to click save!

These filters will help ensure that your flow excludes profiles likely affected by bot clicks, while still including genuine interactions.

Filtering Bot-Clicks in Campaigns

For campaigns, you can create a segment in Klaviyo to identify and exclude some profiles affected by bot clicks.

Here’s the logic I suggest you use:

Like the flow filters, it won’t capture every single bot-click.  You probably don’t want to filter out every profile that has ever bot-clicked, because many of them are actually clicking themselves, and many are probably active, buying customers.

But this way, at least we can capture some to get performance metrics closer to reality.

And you’ll have to find the sweet spot for the time delay. I used this because the “Bot Click” metric on Klaviyo only dated back to that time frame of data for me. Just play with it until your segment captures as many bots as possible.

Once you’ve created your segment, save it and exclude it for your next campaign. 

Results and Conclusion

I tested these filters for a week and saw my click and open rates stabilize. While this method won't capture all bot clicks, it significantly improved the accuracy of my email performance metrics.

Klaviyo support mentioned to me that they are working on more advanced technology for bot filtering, but the timeline for its release is uncertain. In the meantime, try these steps and let me know how they work for you!