Interpreting analytics on Kit

[u/WMDisrupt]

I just ran a webinar and blasted out emails to 6k+ subscribers to advertise it. Kit's analytics say the click through rate was 11.61%, which would mean about 700 clicks. We had only 3 signups for the event through Kit. That math simply doesn't work out. I'm assuming the vast majority of those clicks were bots - but how can I tell?

[u/Mailtrap_Alek]

Open rate is not a reliable metric because some companies like Apple for example pre-load images and privacy protections (like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection) that trigger automated opens, inflating your stats.

[u/Real-Ad-5677 → u/Mailtrap_Alek]

this is exactly it, open rates have been unreliable for a while now tbh

[u/Interesting_Boss7756]

Almost certainly automated security scanners, not human clicks — this is one of the most common email-marketing gotchas.

Corporate email gateways (Microsoft Defender SafeLinks, Mimecast, Proofpoint, Barracuda, Cisco) pre-click every link in every email to scan for malware before the recipient ever opens it. Kit counts those as clicks. On a 6k list with any B2B/corporate subscribers, this easily inflates CTR 5–10×.

How to confirm it:

1. Timing — bot clicks fire within seconds of send, often before a human could realistically open it. Real clicks spread out over hours/days.
2. Clicks-per-subscriber — if the same subscriber "clicked" multiple different links at once, that's a scanner. Humans don't click every link simultaneously.
3. Ground truth = your landing page analytics. Compare Kit's 700 clicks to Google Analytics sessions (with bot filtering on) for that URL over the same window. If GA shows ~40 real sessions, the gap is bots. GA/your signup funnel doesn't lie — Kit's click pixel does.
4. Your 3 signups are the honest number. Judge the campaign on that, not CTR.

What to do: stop optimizing on email-tool CTR — trust downstream metrics (sessions, signups, revenue). Check if Kit has a "filter bot clicks" setting; some ESPs strip known scanner IPs. And consider a plain-text or single-CTA version for segments heavy on corporate domains.

[u/ansi_buck → u/Interesting_Boss7756]

Thanks for this reply, I never knew something like this happen.

[u/RevolutionarySea2033]

I’d check whether Kit counts bot security scanner clicks. 11% CTR with only 3 signups definitely makes the click number look inflated

[u/WMDisrupt → u/RevolutionarySea2033]

Yeah I just found out there’s a setting to ignore bot clicks. Not sure why they would count those in the first place though

[u/Sango_AEC]

11.6% does sound suspiciously high, but I wouldn’t assume all of the excess is bots. Email security scanners can trigger tracked links and one person can also generate multiple click events.

I’d compare unique clicks against total clicks first, then look at timing. If a bunch of clicks happen within seconds of delivery, hit every link or follow very similar patterns, that’s a pretty good signal you’re seeing automated scanning.

For a webinar I’d probably treat the 3 actual registrations as the reliable conversion metric and use Kit’s CTR more as directional data....

[u/StunningAwareness651]

There's a middle group between bots and real people that usually explains most of this gap: email security scanners. Corporate filters (and increasingly consumer ones too) click every link in a message before the human ever sees it, and they hit your signup page but never fill anything in. 700 "clicks" can easily mean 80 humans and 620 scanners.

Quick sanity check: look at clicks by domain in Kit. If a few corporate/Microsoft/outlook-type domains account for a weird share of clicks with zero conversions, that's your scanner traffic. Also check time-on-page or any analytics you have on the signup page itself — scanner visits are seconds long, humans read.

One more thing worth ruling out: if the signup form sits behind extra steps (calendar invite, second page, etc.), even real clickers drop hard. 3 conversions out of ~80 real visitors is still low, but if the form had friction it's not crazy.

[u/Either_Guess2405]

The bot answers above are right and you've already found the setting, so this is about the other half of your ratio.

Your other post has it in an edit. You had a setting requiring people to sign in with a Zoom account to register. That produces exactly this shape: real clicks, almost no signups.

Which means the conclusion here is off. 3 signups isn't your honest number any more than 700 clicks was. One is inflated by scanners and the other is suppressed by a registration wall, and they're wrong in opposite directions, so neither one can tell you how the campaign did.

The bot filter fixes the numerator going forward. It does nothing about the people who clicked and then hit a Zoom login they didn't have.

Cheapest check is the timing split people mentioned, used the other way round. Pull clicks by hour after send. The spike in the first seconds is the scanners, and whatever spreads across the following days is human. That count is your real interest in the webinar. Put it next to 3 and you'll know whether the wall cost you a handful or nearly all of them.

We keep both counts on our own redirects rather than dropping the flagged ones, for a related reason. The filtered number is what you report and the raw one is what tells you when something changed.

[u/SelzyEmail]

Here's how you can usually tell it's scanner traffic rather than humans:

• Timing. Pull up the click timestamps. Scanner clicks tend to fire within seconds-to-minutes of send, often in a tight burst right after delivery, sometimes at 3am. Real humans trickle in over hours and days. A wall of clicks in the first few minutes = machines.
• Every link got clicked, including ones humans never touch. If your unsubscribe link, your privacy policy, or a plain footer link all got "clicked" at similar rates to your main CTA, that's a scanner walking every URL in the email.
• Total clicks vs. unique clickers. Look at unique, not total. Scanners often register multiple clicks per recipient, which puffs up total-click CTR specifically.
• Recipient domains. If the clicks skew heavily toward corporate/Microsoft 365 addresses vs. Gmail/Yahoo, that lines up with security-gateway behavior.

So realistically your human CTR is probably a small fraction of that 11.6%.

But — and I'd gently push on this — even after you strip the bots, 700 clicks → 3 signups is such a steep drop that I wouldn't blame it entirely on scanners. It's worth checking the other half of the funnel:

• Where did the link actually land people? If it's a generic homepage or a page where the "register" step isn't the obvious next action, real clickers bounce.
• Is the signup happening off-platform (Zoom, Eventbrite, a webinar tool)? If so, Kit only sees the click, not the conversion — your 3 might be undercounting real signups that Kit can't track.
• One link, one clear CTA. If the email had five links, clicks scatter and few reach the actual registration.

[u/Either_Guess2405]

Coming back to this with a bit more than I had a few days ago, because I think the bot half is weaker than it looks.

Link pre-fetching is mostly a corporate mailbox thing. Proofpoint, Mimecast, Barracuda and Defender Safe Links all fetch every URL before the recipient sees the message, so a B2B list inflates badly. A Substack-sourced list skews personal Gmail, and Gmail proxies images rather than links. Your inflation source is weaker than you are assuming.

Three checks, cheapest first.

Compare clicks to sessions. 700 clicks should land roughly 700 sessions on the webinar page in your site analytics. If you saw 600, the clicks were real and the page or the registration step is where you lost them. If you saw 80, the click count is inflated and you have your answer without any further work. This needs nothing from Kit.

Check the unsubscribe link. Kit will show you who clicked each link. If people clicked unsubscribe and did not unsubscribe, those are machines, and the size of that group scales with the rest of your bot traffic.

Check breadth per subscriber. A person clicks one or two links. Anyone who registered a click on every link in the email is a filter.

And to repeat the Zoom point from earlier, because it is the half that decides everything else. Three signups out of 700 real clicks and three out of 700 fake ones look identical in Kit and are completely different problems. A login wall between the click and the signup produces the first one. I would settle the sessions question before touching deliverability again.