Hundreds of opens from individual email recipients - sudden spike in the past week

[user44139]

I manage email campaigns for many different clients, and just this week I have started to notice a pattern - dozens of individual email recipients are each opening my email campaigns hundreds of times. I know that forwards can cause artificially inflated open numbers, but I'm seeing 100-200 logged opens. More interestingly, they seem to be clustered within certain email domains - in a campaign I reviewed today, the top 5 openers each opened the email between 150 and 200 times, and all 5 work for the same company and have the same email domain. The 6th and 7th most prolific openers have 150-160 opens each, and they both work for the same company. The 8-10 highest openers have 80-90 opens each, and they too all work for the same company. Does anybody have any insight into what might be causing this, and how I can weed these artificially inflated numbers out?

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @user44139 ,

If these contacts' networks / security programs are using bots to scan for malware, or they're distribution lists / auto-forwarding to larger groups of people, then the numbers are going to be skewed regardless.

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. That way your main emails to your direct, human contacts will have more accurate reporting. 

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.

[JoeV2]

We had a similar issue with inflated numbers of click throughs on an email that went out on March 15 at 10:51 am. There were hundreds of click throughs to several links in the email (including Constant Contact's legal page) with the same time stamp at 10:53 am. Email addresses went to many different domains. We usually get no more than a 5% click rate and this one was at 37%.

Thanks,

Joe