Hello - I've been diving into our direct email campaign click reports and noticed some unusual click activity lately.
I'm curious if anyone has tips or strategies for effectively filtering out bot-generated clicks from these reports? It's important for us to ensure the accuracy of our campaign analytics.
Any insights or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your help!
Hello @user41581 ,
If their network or email program uses some kind of security tool that "opens" emails and "clicks" their links to check for malware, it can result in that kind of data. This will be indicated by those contacts clicking all the poll options at the same time, typically within 1-2 minutes of you sending the email.
In all honesty, the only suggestion I'd normally have is to swap your authentication to self-authentication since you have your own domain, however your account is already set up as such. Ideally, this would show the security algorithms that emails being sent through us by you are effectively coming directly from you, and avoid triggering the clicks/opens from bots.
Beyond that, there's not much else you can do from your end to prevent these. Our devs are constantly trying to identify the various programs that utilize this functionality, so they can set our system to ignore the behavior and triggers from these particular programs. If the click rates continue to be inflated or worsen, then it may be worth calling in. That way our general support or higher level technical team can see if there's any further info that can be gleamed from the content of the emails with you live on the phone, or to see if the domains of the contacts that are seeming to bot-click them show any other particular consistencies we can track.
If you're finding a significant amount of your contacts are utilizing these programs, then the other advice I have would come down to one of two options:
Hello @user41581 ,
If their network or email program uses some kind of security tool that "opens" emails and "clicks" their links to check for malware, it can result in that kind of data. This will be indicated by those contacts clicking all the poll options at the same time, typically within 1-2 minutes of you sending the email.
In all honesty, the only suggestion I'd normally have is to swap your authentication to self-authentication since you have your own domain, however your account is already set up as such. Ideally, this would show the security algorithms that emails being sent through us by you are effectively coming directly from you, and avoid triggering the clicks/opens from bots.
Beyond that, there's not much else you can do from your end to prevent these. Our devs are constantly trying to identify the various programs that utilize this functionality, so they can set our system to ignore the behavior and triggers from these particular programs. If the click rates continue to be inflated or worsen, then it may be worth calling in. That way our general support or higher level technical team can see if there's any further info that can be gleamed from the content of the emails with you live on the phone, or to see if the domains of the contacts that are seeming to bot-click them show any other particular consistencies we can track.
If you're finding a significant amount of your contacts are utilizing these programs, then the other advice I have would come down to one of two options:
I also have noticed the effects of bot-clicks or server-clicks in click reports. The sign is 10 clicks attributed to one email address.
Will bots click fewer links? For example, one email address clicks only the first four links.
I've observed this pattern at a different company.
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