Bots effecting our click results

[user41581]

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!

[user41581]

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:

• Delete the bot-click contacts from your account entirely - only do this if you feel they are not worthwhile clientele/customers, and aren't actually interested in what you're sending them.
• Make "Bot-Click" versions of all of your lists, and move these contacts out of the normal lists and into those bot-click versions. Then you'd need to have two copies of each email, one for the regular contacts and the other for the bot-clicks, and send the email to the corresponding list. This way your reporting for the normal contacts is more accurate, and the bot-clickers are isolated but still available to send to. This won't help your account's overall averages for reporting, but it will make the specified email campaigns, and the Reporting page if specifically comparing those, much more accurate for your needs. 

[William_A · Accepted solution]

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:

• Delete the bot-click contacts from your account entirely - only do this if you feel they are not worthwhile clientele/customers, and aren't actually interested in what you're sending them.
• Make "Bot-Click" versions of all of your lists, and move these contacts out of the normal lists and into those bot-click versions. Then you'd need to have two copies of each email, one for the regular contacts and the other for the bot-clicks, and send the email to the corresponding list. This way your reporting for the normal contacts is more accurate, and the bot-clickers are isolated but still available to send to. This won't help your account's overall averages for reporting, but it will make the specified email campaigns, and the Reporting page if specifically comparing those, much more accurate for your needs. 

[BeccaE]

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.

[CIFMarketing0296]

Sometimes there are 10 clicks and other times there are fewer. You can export the list to Excel and then put the open dates and times in the first column. Look across to see if you have multiple clicks at the same exact time and date from the same user. Be careful as there can be 2-4 clicks by the same user but at different times. My educated guess is that these are legit. Also, there might be single clicks sandwiched in between multiple bot click lists. Don't delete those.

[CIFMarketing0296]

Sorry, delete the multiples with matching times and dates.