Summary
Automated scripts and crawlers can significantly skew your email campaign metrics by generating artificial opens and clicks. These false interactions often originate from security scanners, email preview services, or even malicious bots aiming to gather data or test systems. Identifying and excluding this bot traffic is crucial for maintaining the integrity of your email performance data and making informed marketing decisions.
Key findings
- Common signatures: You might observe user agents like python-requests/2.19.1 or AHC/2.1, which are indicators of automated scripts rather than human interaction.
- IP address origins: A high concentration of opens from specific IP ranges, particularly those belonging to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, often points to automated activity.
- Security scans: Many organizations, especially educational institutions, deploy email firewalls or security software that scan incoming emails for malicious content, which can trigger artificial opens and clicks.
- Skewed metrics: These automated interactions inflate open and click rates, leading to an inaccurate understanding of subscriber engagement and campaign effectiveness.
Key considerations
- Data accuracy: It is important to filter out these artificial opens to get a true picture of your campaign performance and user engagement.
- Impact on deliverability: While these opens do not directly harm your deliverability, misinterpreting them can lead to poor strategic decisions (e.g., re-engaging supposedly unengaged subscribers who are actually bots).
- Exclusion strategies: Implement methods within your email service provider (ESP) or analytics tools to identify and exclude traffic originating from known bot user agents and cloud IP ranges.
- Real engagement: Focus on metrics like actual clicks to links within the email (excluding those identified as bot-driven) and conversions, as these are stronger indicators of human interest.
What email marketers say
Email marketers frequently encounter the challenge of distinguishing genuine engagement from automated bot activity. They observe inflated open and click rates, often from suspicious IP addresses, which can make it difficult to assess campaign effectiveness. This issue is particularly prevalent when sending to large organizations with robust email security infrastructures.
Key opinions
- Identifying patterns: Marketers note that suspicious activity often comes from the same IP addresses, with user agents clearly indicating automated scripts.
- AWS and cloud IPs: A significant portion of bot traffic originates from cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and DigitalOcean, which are rarely used by real end-users for email access.
- Firewall interaction: It is often suggested that corporate or educational institution firewalls are responsible, opening emails to scan content before delivery, leading to false opens.
- Data distortion: Automated opens and clicks significantly distort open rates and click-through rates, making it challenging to understand true subscriber engagement.
Key considerations
- Filtering IPs: Marketers consider excluding IP addresses associated with known cloud providers and automated systems from their open tracking to achieve more accurate metrics.
- Exclusion scripts: Some marketers use exclusion scripts within their marketing automation platforms to prevent sending to or tracking certain types of bot-like interactions, ensuring messages are more relevant and effective.
- Holistic view: Beyond opens, marketers emphasize looking at other engagement metrics, such as conversions, to gauge the true success of campaigns, as bot traffic impacts various analytics.
- List hygiene: Regularly cleaning and filtering bot-generated email addresses from contact lists is vital for improving overall deliverability and sender reputation.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests that automated scripts causing email opens are likely common tasks that help automate system functions.
Marketer view
Marketer from DataDome explains that a straightforward method to exclude bot traffic from analytics is by enabling the 'exclude all hits from known bots and spiders' option in view settings.
What the experts say
Experts in email deliverability and security view automated opens and clicks as a significant data integrity issue. They highlight the technical mechanisms behind these interactions and provide strategies for accurate measurement and mitigation. Understanding the nature of these bots, whether they are security scanners or less benign entities, is key to managing their impact.
Key opinions
- Security scanners: Many email security systems proactively open emails and click links to scan for malicious content (e.g., viruses, phishing attempts) before the email reaches the recipient's inbox.
- User agent analysis: Analyzing the user agent strings (e.g., python-requests, AHC) associated with opens helps differentiate human interactions from automated ones.
- Cloud infrastructure: A significant portion of bot activity, including email scanners and crawlers, operates from IP ranges allocated to major cloud providers, which are typically not used by human end-users for daily email access.
- Data accuracy vs. deliverability: While automated opens don't directly hurt deliverability or lead to being blocklisted, they distort campaign metrics. This can misinform decisions related to sender reputation and engagement strategies.
Key considerations
- IP exclusion: Experts recommend creating lists of known bot IPs and IP ranges (especially cloud provider ranges) to exclude them from open and click tracking.
- User agent filtering: Filtering data based on suspicious user agent strings can help isolate automated interactions.
- Behavioral analysis: Beyond simple opens, examine click patterns, time of open, and subsequent actions. Bots often click links instantly after opening, which can be an indicator of non-human activity. Advanced detection methods are key.
- Preventing bot sign-ups: Implementing CAPTCHAs or other verification methods at subscription points can prevent bots from joining your lists in the first place, reducing future automated interactions.
Expert view
Expert from SpamResource emphasizes that email security scanners, often deployed by large organizations and ISPs, pre-open emails to check for malicious content before delivery to the inbox.
Expert view
Expert from Word to the Wise advises that quick, uniform open rates shortly after an email is sent are strong indicators of bot activity rather than genuine human engagement.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and technical guides provide crucial insights into how automated systems operate and how to identify their digital footprints. Understanding these technical specifications, such as user agent strings and IP ranges, is fundamental for accurately parsing email engagement data and ensuring compliance with best practices.
Key findings
- User agent identification: Many automated scripts and crawlers identify themselves with distinct user agent strings, providing a direct way to recognize their activity in logs.
- Cloud IP ranges: Major cloud service providers publish their IP address ranges (both IPv4 and IPv6), enabling users to programmatically identify traffic originating from these platforms. For example, AWS offers a JSON file containing all their IP space.
- Automated security checks: Security solutions often employ automated processes to open emails and click links in a sandbox environment to detect malware and phishing attempts.
- Image proxy behavior: Email service providers like Gmail use image proxies that can pre-fetch images, registering opens before the user actually views the email.
Key considerations
- Log analysis: Regularly analyze your email logs for unusual patterns, such as rapid successive opens, opens from unexpected geographic locations, or opens from known automated user agents.
- Exclusion rules: Implement specific rules or scripts within your tracking systems to filter out opens and clicks that match known bot signatures or originate from suspicious IP ranges.
- Plain text emails: Understand that including plaintext versions of emails can sometimes lead to increased bot activity as they can parse content more easily.
- API integration: For advanced filtering, integrate with your ESP's API to pull raw open/click data and apply custom logic to identify and remove bot interactions before reporting.
Technical article
Documentation from Google for Developers explains that a robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine crawlers on which URLs they can access on a site, primarily to prevent server overload.
Technical article
Documentation from F5 Labs outlines advanced detection methods and techniques required to effectively identify and manage sophisticated web scrapers and bot traffic.
Related resources
8 resources
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