{"id":22166,"date":"2025-04-08T18:55:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T18:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hustlermarketing.com\/?p=22166"},"modified":"2025-04-08T18:59:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T18:59:34","slug":"bot-clicks-or-buyers-how-to-tidy-your-klaviyo-without-losing-revenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hustlermarketing.com\/blog\/bot-clicks-or-buyers-how-to-tidy-your-klaviyo-without-losing-revenue\/","title":{"rendered":"Bot Clicks Or Buyers? How to Tidy Your Klaviyo Without Losing Revenue"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’re optimizing your Klaviyo and you want to get rid of bot clicks. You want clean data, accurate attribution, and a list that’s free of junk profiles. So you tweak a few settings. Maybe you shorten your attribution window, or segment out blocks and Apple Privacy opens.<\/p>\n

Smart, right?<\/p>\n

Well, maybe not.<\/p>\n

Depending on how your setup works, you might be excluding real customers across your campaigns. Even worse, you could be misattributing revenue in flows, while those same profiles still enter the automation. Either way, you’re getting an inconsistent picture of performance, and you may be losing out on real revenue.<\/p>\n

In this blog, we’ll break down how inbox security systems can skew your email data, and what that means for your revenue attribution<\/a>. We’ll also look at why some filters might be doing more harm than good.<\/p>\n

So What are Bot Clicks, Really?<\/h2>\n

On most email platforms (like Klaviyo), a bot click is a link click that appears to come from a non-human interaction, like a script or automated process.<\/p>\n

But not all “bot clicks” come from actual bots.<\/p>\n

Some inbox providers, like Gmail or corporate email servers, use security filters that automatically click every link in incoming emails. This is a safety measure to scan for malicious content.<\/p>\n

The problem is that email service providers (ESPs) can’t always tell the difference. If a security system clicks a link on behalf of a human user, Klaviyo still logs it as a bot click and flags the profile. That usually leads to removing the profile from the list.<\/p>\n

So, even if that real customer opens, reads, and purchases later…you might never email them again. They’re on the bot list, and they won’t get future email marketing campaigns and email marketing flows.<\/p>\n

When Bot Clicks Exclusion Goes Wrong: Real Revenue Horror Stories<\/h2>\n

We recently helped a store who had changed their attribution model from 3 to 5 days. They had also begun to exclude bot clicks, which they had not done before.<\/p>\n

A couple of totally predictable things happened:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Email-attributed revenue dropped. This is inevitable, because Klaviyo was now linking less revenue to emails.<\/li>\n
  2. Engagement also dropped. Again, this was not surprising: at least some of the opens they had been getting were genuine bot clicks and machine opens.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But then we noticed something far more important: website sessions coming from Klaviyo also dropped.<\/p>\n

    After digging in, we found that the majority (yes, MAJORITY) of these profiles were real customers. They had been engaging and shopping with the brand before the change. But the bot clicks exclusion had cut them out of all email communication.<\/p>\n

    These exclusions were cutting valuable (human) subscribers out of the loop. These were profiles who had:<\/p>\n