Omit Clicks, Opens, etc. from reporting when performed by a security program

[BarryW49]

Seems that a number of companies have started automatically tracing back all the links in emails. This makes the click reports pretty useless. Results are swamped with this.

[KimR81]

We have used Constant Contact for years, and I have been a big fan, until today. Today I learned that a large percentage of the clicks I was reporting to my clients were really fake Spam Check clicks. On the most recent click list, the fake clicks totaled more than 95%. I did not initially discover this through Constant Contact informing me of this issue. I had to figure it out myself in collaboration with a client. It seems that I have been sending highly inflated click figures and reports to my clients for years now. This not only makes Constant Contact look bad, it also reflects very poorly on our agency. You should have let us know that this is an issue.

[RandyE74]

Thank you for your response. Firstly, let’s be clear on the difference between an “open” and a “click” on emails sent from a campaign. I am of the assumption than an “open” occurs when a recipient opens an email from their inbox, then that should be reported as an “open”, and if a recipient clicks on a link that’s in a campaign, then that should be reported as a “click”. However, my concerns were not about the “clicks” even though I find them to be very low based on the contents of my campaign and the curiosity of my Caribbean base. A red flag was raised when your report showed that quite a few emails were opened at the same time all the emails were delivered. After checking with a few of my clients they told me that they did not open their email. I called and spoke to one of your representatives and was told that “campaign-emails” had to go through a software system which checked for spam. At that time those emails were reported as open when in fact, those emails were only sitting in the recipient’s inboxes. It was also observed that the time was changed when the recipient actually opened the email. So it stands to believe that if the recipient never opens an email, your report would still show that it was open. It also raised the question about the validity of the emails that were reported delivered. The fact remains that only the emails reported open” by the spam checking software would go to the recipient’s inbox. So, it is let to believe that the delivered emails which would have passed through the spam checking system would all be reported as “open”. Wow! That is frightening. Again, thank you for following up and the changes you are making to fix the problems that could be misleading to your customers.

[user97507]

A list member opened her email on her computer but you were showing it as not opened. 

She opened it a few hours later on her phone and it showed as opened. So your reporting is not accurate. 

[RyanF71]

I'm also seeing this happening extensively in our campaign results too. It makes reporting for our advertisers quite challenging. It would be nice if there was some way to allow clients the option of setting criteria for excluding certain results. For instance, we could manually identify domains that have these tendencies, then discard clicks from those domains if certain criteria is met like if they clicked all links at the same time within the first two minutes the campaign was released. Perhaps making it an optional thing. Otherwise this becomes quite a tedious process when reporting on multiple links per email.