How to determine valid open report statistics

[BethS8192]

When reviewing Open Reports for an email marketing campaign, it's clear that bots opening and clicking the email are skewing the numbers.  My question is regarding HOW to determine which opens are valid.  For example, if you send an email at 8:00 am to a company with 100 recipients, and the report shows 50 contacts opened at 8:00 am exactly, 10 opened at 8:01 am, 10 opened at 8:02 am, etc. up until 8:05 or 8:10 am...are any of those opens valid? What should the time cut off point be where I can assume it's a valid unique open of the email?  Would it be based on the number of minutes AFTER the email is sent, or based on the opens dwindling to one at a time?

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @BethS8192 ,

Are the contacts that opened in those following minutes also clicking every link in your email within that same minute? If so, then that would indicate they're also using a bot program. Even if the actual person later opens and clicks in a normal manner, their unique reporting data has already skewed the overall reporting. 

To be frank, the reporting info for these contacts simply won't be viable ever. If you're wanting to keep them separate for the sake for your reporting, then I'd advise isolating these contacts to a new list meant for contacts that auto-forward or use bot security checks, and send separate email copies to that list. This way your main emails to your direct, human contacts will have more accurate reporting, but you're not risking unsubscribing / deleting a viable contact that just happens to also use the bot programs.

If you'd like the step-by-step process of what I'm describing:

1. Identify the contacts that are causing these bloated open and click statistics. Consider tagging them for quick referral when you identify them, as this can quicken the list creation.
2. Create a new list, call it something obvious like "Suspected Bot / Auto-Forward Contacts," then add the suspected contacts to that list. If you need to be particularly granular with the list memberships, then I'd advise instead making "suspected..." copies of each of your lists, and applying these suspected contacts to the applicable copied lists.
   • Consider making a note in the suspect contacts of what lists they were previously on, or use the tags mentioned earlier, in case you decide later you don't like this setup and want to put the suspect contacts back into the main lists.
3. Once the suspect contacts are on the suspect list(s), remove them from the normal list(s) they're on.
4. From here on, you'll need to send two versions of the emails you'd normally be sending to these lists - one for the seemingly normal contacts, and a copy that you send to the suspect lists.

Beyond that, there's not much else you can do from your end. 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.