Good morning all!
The Reporting team here at Constant Contact is always looking for ways to make your marketing data more accurate. Last year, we introduced Bot Click Filtering (now automatically enabled for new accounts created in 2026) to help cut down on "fake" email clicks from bots, security programs, and the like. If you haven't enabled that on your account, we highly recommend it!
Today, I am proud to announce that we're rolling out the same protections for Email Opens. Starting today (and over the course of the next few weeks), we'll be slowly enabling Bot Open Filtering across all Constant Contact accounts.
This first release is focused on excluding Opens from solutions like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection system. Services like these are awesome for preserving privacy for individuals, but they do make it more difficult to know if your messages are being opened. Here's how things are going to work moving forward:
When you look at the statistics for your emails, you'll see that Opens have been split into two categories: Confirmed opens are from people, and proxy opens are from security/privacy services and bots.
If we can confirm that one of your contacts clicked on something in one of your emails and we notice that they don't have a Confirmed open, we'll automatically record one for them.
Opens rates will be calculated with Confirmed opens only.
These changes will also impact the Industry open rates that we show across the product. Since these are calculated every night, they'll take a little bit to settle out over the next few weeks as more and more accounts are added to the Bot Open Filtering program.
You may see your open rates decrease after these changes go live -- this is normal, as we're taking the bot opens out of the calculations to make your Opens and Open Rates more accurate. If you'd like some more information on how this works under the hood, check out our Knowledge Base article.
We're going to be offering additional reporting tools around this in the coming months, so if you have any specific requests, please let us know!
--Kyle
