Summary
Minimizing and accurately identifying bot clicks in email marketing is crucial for reliable data and effective campaign optimization. While completely eliminating automated interactions is often unfeasible, especially with modern privacy and security measures like Apple Mail Privacy Protection and corporate email scanners, the focus should shift towards robust detection and filtering. This ensures that your engagement metrics reflect genuine human interest, preventing skewed reporting and unintended automation triggers. Understanding the different types of non-human interactions (NHI) is the first step in addressing this challenge, allowing marketers to implement strategies that both mitigate false positives and leverage useful data from certain bot activities.
Key findings
- Focus on filtering: Efforts are often better spent on identifying and filtering bot clicks rather than trying to prevent them entirely, as many are legitimate security scans.
- Metric accuracy: Bot clicks can significantly skew campaign metrics, making it difficult to gauge true user engagement and campaign performance.
- Sender reputation impact: While not directly causing deliverability issues, a high volume of bot clicks can sometimes correlate with reputation, with better domain reputation leading to fewer scans. Learn more about how to improve your domain reputation.
- Automation risks: Automated clicks can trigger unintended actions within your marketing automation sequences, leading to poor customer experience or data corruption. Identifying and handling these suspicious interactions is key, as discussed in our guide on how to identify and handle suspicious bot clicks.
Key considerations
- Understanding NHI sources: Be aware that not all non-human interactions are malicious bots. Many are legitimate privacy or security scanners from ISPs like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, or corporate proxies.
- Adjusting metrics: Acknowledge that traditional open and click rates may not solely represent human interaction. Focus on more reliable downstream metrics or segmented data to assess true engagement.
- Preventing state changes: Avoid designing systems where a single email click can change a user's account state or trigger irreversible actions, as bots may inadvertently cause issues.
- Leveraging bot data: Some bot interactions can provide useful deliverability insights, such as indicating that your email has passed through certain security filters, as noted by EmailTooltester.com.
What email marketers say
Email marketers frequently encounter bot clicks, which complicate the analysis of campaign performance. While direct prevention of all bot activity is challenging due to the evolving landscape of email security and privacy features, the primary approach among marketers involves intelligent identification and subsequent filtering. This allows for more accurate reporting and ensures that automated processes are not erroneously triggered by non-human interactions. The key is to adapt reporting methodologies and campaign triggers to account for these synthetic clicks.
Key opinions
- Filter for clarity: Marketers widely agree that separating bot clicks from human clicks is essential for accurate reporting, even if it means displaying lower engagement numbers compared to platforms with less stringent filtering. Our guide on identifying bot clicks from Microsoft/Outlook domains provides further detail.
- Adjusting expectations: It is generally accepted that traditional open and click rates no longer exclusively represent human actions, requiring a shift in how campaign success is measured.
- Data transparency: Some marketers suggest providing both filtered and unfiltered metrics in reporting to address concerns from stakeholders who compare engagement rates across different platforms.
- Prevalence of corporate scans: Many B2B marketers specifically point to corporate email security scanners, such as those from Outlook, as a significant source of non-human clicks.
Key considerations
- Impact on automations: Marketers need to be mindful that automations driven by clicks or opens can lead to negative recipient experiences if triggered by bots. Implement detection methods to minimize this.
- Defining 'bot': The definition of a bot click can vary significantly between Email Service Providers (ESPs) and internal definitions. This variability affects reported numbers.
- Alternative metrics: Rethink the reliance on raw click data. Instead, consider focusing on conversions, website engagement, or other metrics that are less susceptible to bot interference. ActiveCampaign suggests focusing on deeper engagement signals.
- Preventing accidental actions: Ensure that a single click cannot fundamentally change a user's account status or system state, mitigating risks posed by automated scanners.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks observes that their new employer has experienced a notable increase in non-human clicks. They suspect that a significant portion of these clicks originate from corporate customers, particularly those using Outlook, which is known for its security scanning features.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks states their approach involves segmenting out bot clicks entirely, ensuring that while these automated interactions still receive the same emails, they are explicitly excluded from their primary reporting metrics to maintain accuracy.
What the experts say
Industry experts provide a nuanced perspective on bot clicks, often highlighting that a significant portion are not malicious but rather part of legitimate security and privacy measures by Mailbox Providers (MBPs). They emphasize that efforts to completely eliminate these clicks are futile and misdirected. Instead, the consensus points towards sophisticated identification, filtering, and adjustment of analytical frameworks to ensure that marketing decisions are based on genuine human engagement, not synthetic interactions. They also stress the potential for specific bot data to offer valuable deliverability insights.
Key opinions
- Focus on identification: Experts generally agree that the most effective strategy is to invest resources in identifying and filtering bot clicks, rather than attempting to prevent them entirely.
- Not all bots are bad: Some automated interactions, such as those from security scanners, can provide useful information about how emails are being processed by recipient systems.
- Privacy vs. metrics: Mailbox providers often obfuscate user interactions through proxies for privacy and security reasons, making it inherently difficult for marketers to measure human engagement accurately.
- Reputation correlation: There is a correlation between sender reputation and non-human interactions; better reputation tends to result in fewer security scans. Understanding your email domain reputation is key.
- Advanced detection for clicks: While open detection is simpler, identifying bot clicks requires more advanced methods.
Key considerations
- Avoid state-changing clicks: Never design email links that, when clicked, change the state of a user's account or system without additional confirmation. This prevents bots from inadvertently causing issues.
- Rethink click metrics: Question the true utility of raw click numbers for understanding user engagement. Explore alternative, more reliable metrics that reflect genuine interest and conversions.
- ESP filtering differences: Recognize that different ESPs (Email Service Providers) will have varying methodologies for identifying and filtering bot activity, leading to discrepancies in reported metrics. EmailTooltester.com highlights this variability.
- Preventing automation mishaps: Implement robust detection of non-human interactions (NHIs) to ensure that automated sequences, such as welcome series or follow-ups, are only triggered by actual human engagement, preventing uncomfortable scenarios for recipients.
Expert view
Deliverability expert from Email Geeks suggests that marketers' efforts are more effectively directed towards identifying and filtering bot clicks rather than trying to prevent them entirely. This approach acknowledges the pervasive nature of automated interactions.
Expert view
Deliverability expert from Email Geeks points out that it has been many years since open or click numbers accurately represented mostly human activity. They explain that mailbox providers intentionally obfuscate user interactions for privacy, using proxies and other tools.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and industry reports often acknowledge the pervasive nature of bot clicks, framing them as a complex challenge influenced by evolving privacy features and security protocols. They typically advise on methods for detection and mitigation rather than outright prevention. These resources provide insights into technical approaches, such as analyzing click patterns, utilizing hidden links (honeypots), and leveraging platform-specific filtering tools to distinguish genuine user engagement from automated activity. The overarching message is to adapt to these changes and rely on more sophisticated data analysis.
Key findings
- Data accuracy is key: Tracking traffic sources helps ensure that real user engagement drives marketing decisions, preventing distortion by automated bot filtering.
- Bot behavior patterns: Bots often exhibit distinct click patterns, such as extremely fast clicks or clicks from suspicious IP ranges (e.g., data centers), which can be used for identification.
- Platform filtering tools: Many email platforms offer built-in solutions to filter out automated clicks based on predefined patterns and rules, which helps in maintaining clean data.
- Privacy settings influence: ISP privacy settings and security filters are major contributors to bot-like clicks, as they often preload or scan email links before a recipient interacts with them. This is an important consideration for email deliverability.
Key considerations
- Honeypot links: Embedding invisible honeypot links in emails can effectively identify bot clicks, as only automated systems (not humans) would interact with them. For more, see our guide on honeypots in B2B emails.
- Double opt-in: Implementing double opt-in for new subscribers can reduce bot activity at the signup stage, indirectly reducing future bot clicks. This is critical for preventing bot signups.
- Auditing automation triggers: Regularly review and adjust automated marketing flows that rely on click data to ensure they are not being inadvertently triggered by non-human interactions.
- Segmentation: Use bot click data as a filter when building segments to either analyze the impact of bot activity or to exclude affected profiles from engagement reports, as suggested by Klaviyo Help Center.
Technical article
Documentation from Klaviyo Help Center states that bot click data can be effectively used as a filter when segmenting customer profiles. This allows marketers to either observe the number of profiles experiencing bot clicks or to exclude them from specific analyses, ensuring cleaner data.
Technical article
Documentation from Mailjet notes that ISP privacy settings and security filters can often trigger bot-like clicks. These systems typically preload or scan email links before the actual recipient even opens the email, contributing to inflated click metrics.
Related resources
15 resources
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