Bot clicks in email marketing refer to automated clicks on links within emails, typically generated by security systems or bots.
These automated clicks are often triggered by security software scanning emails for potential threats like phishing attempts or malicious links.
While intended to enhance security, bot clicks can skew email engagement metrics, making it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance and user engagement.
In this blog, we are going outline how exactly these bots work and what it means for your reporting.
How do they work?
It all starts with an email being delivered to a receiving server. Once the connection to the receiving server has been made and the email has been accepted, the connection is closed.
The receiving server will then scan the email to look for any viruses or malicious content before it decides to release the email to the recipient’s inbox. This can be done using various filters such as Mimecast.
These types of email content checkers are completely dependent on individual company’s IT policy, in that some companies may want to scan the whole campaign or maybe images/links only.
These bots scan, and more often than not, click all links in a campaign. If deemed safe, it will deliver the email to the recipients inbox. This clicking of links is what skews the end reporting.
Spotting bots in results
Luckily, there is a quick way to identify bots in your reporting! This is by observing if an email address has clicked on every single link at least once (including the text version links) all within the same minute. You can then see if there are any clicks which happened after this time which can be assumed to be genuine recipient clicks.
How do we overcome the skewed reporting?
It is very difficult to determine bot from genuine clicks. One way we have tried to do this at Campaignmaster is through our spam bot report. This report uses honey pot links (hidden links that are not clickable by recipients). If this link is clicked, then we can assume the results are bot related.
Bots often click links very quickly after an email is delivered, sometimes within a fraction of a second. Human users typically take longer to read and process an email before clicking anything. By checking the time of the clicks in relation to the time of the launch, you can identify potential spam bots. Furthermore, bots tend to click on all links in an email in rapid succession, while humans are more likely to click on a few links that are relevant to them.
Multiple clicks from the same IP address (especially if it’s a known bot IP or data centre) could indicate bot activity.
Any questions? Please email us at info@campaignmaster.co.uk and one of our friendly reps would be more than happy to help.
Alternatively, you can sign up for a demo here.
