Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

Email Click Rates: The Fake Clicks Wrecking Your Data

10 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:06

In this video segment, Jimmy Kim explains that email click‑through rates are heavily inflated by automated security bots that pre‑click every link in an email to scan for malware. These bot clicks are recorded in analytics as genuine human clicks, skewing performance metrics. The effect is most severe for B2B and corporate‑subscriber audiences, where 40‑60% of reported clicks can be bot‑generated, while even direct‑to‑consumer (DTC) brands see a non‑trivial 10‑25% of clicks coming from bots. Kim highlights that marketers often trust click rates without realizing this distortion, which undermines the reliability of email marketing data.

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Click rates are also inflated way more than most marketers realize. The one fewer people seem to know about, and everyone knows that open rates are broken, or a lot of people do, right? But I'm sure there's somebody who still watched this first one and said, well, I didn't know all this, right? But click rates, marketers still trust those. And you know, frankly, it's now at a world there they shouldn't be. And let me walk you through why. All right, I'm gonna tell you exactly why. We were talking about this not too long ago with your accounts, Chase, but email security tools, almost every corporate email address, right? Email account address and a lot of consumer email providers providers these days, they run these automated security scannings. That way they are scanning if the link in the email has malware ultimately.
Have you seen that before? So every link in your email gets clicked by a bot before the customer ever even sees it?
Yeah. And look, that click registers as a click in your analytics, same as a human click. And the brands that get hit hardest by are the ones that are in B2B or brands that have a lot of corporate subscribers. And these click rates, they can be like 40 to 60% bot traffic. D2C brands have a lot less of this bad, but it's still meaningful where 10 to 25% of the clicks on an average DTC brand are probably bot-driven.