In case anyone else is dealing with inflated engagement metrics, we’ve been working on trying to exclude bot clicks by excluding emails based on first open date/time, latest open date/time, first click date/time, etc.
One of the things we’d like to see added to the available data is a “total email links” field that gives the number of links in an email -- that way if the number of clicks equaled the number of total links, we might suspect a bot was behind at least one of those opens.
The other thing we’d like to see is some way to toggle a “Bot engagement” filter on/off, since most emails opened/clicked by bots will do so right at the moment the email is sent/received.
The difficulty we’re running into is:
How do we account for an email that is FIRST opened by a bot (immediately upon inbox receipt), and THEN opened by a human? Yes, some people who live in their inbox--or who see the incoming email notification--do open an email within seconds of its delivery and do click through on a CTA, but that’s also when the security bots open and click.
This hasn’t been as much of an issue until only recently, when we saw an email with open/click engagement in the high 80%. When we excluded anything that was opened/clicked within about 10 seconds, those percentages dropped by about 20% -- far more of an increase than we’ve seen previously.
