Inaccurate click and open rates

Hi Scott. Welcome to the community. Inaccurate open and click rates are common across all email marketing platforms. I’m assuming you don’t know this so apologies if you do. If you’re sending to government, education, or large corporates, there’s no a lot that can be done. Their spam filters are downloading images (one of which is used to record an open), and following links to ensure the destination is ‘safe’. If you’re sending to shared email domains (Gmail, yahoo etc) their spam filters are doing the same but as your sender reputation improves with them, they’ll eventually stop checking links. AC do have a spam bot reporting feature in beta at the moment. But that doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, only allows you to take that into account in reports. Another option is to create your own hidden monitoring pixel. Subtract the number of clicks on that from the total number of clicks and you should get a more accurate number of human clicks. It doesn’t help you but I hope it explains what’s going on. Cheers. Shane #humanauthor.

Thanks Shane - can you shed any light on why it would happen only on some campaigns but not others - when i am sending to the same people!!

Unfortunately, no. I have two businesses that have excellent sender reputation with Gmail and Yahoo mail and I’m seeing the same. It’s bugging me trying to work it out. I’m gathering some info to take to AC support and see if they can shed any light.

Thanks Shane - the frustration for me is that AC just said it was normal - which obviously isn’t - getting 15000 clicks, when a ‘normal’ campaign might get 100!

can you still tell who has ‘legitimately’ opened it and who hasn’t? If i don’t know this then it is somewhat useless tool if i don’t actually know who has opened it!

For accurate indicators of who opened an email or not or who selected a CTA or not, I’d say no. You need to be planning on moving accurate metrics out of email marketing. For instance, my freebies are accessed by sending subscribers to a landing page and recording when they select the button to download said freebie or signing up for a free course or signing up for a paid course. Anyone who’s not doing any of those needs to be retargeted in some way. Have you sent an email to a test Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com account? I do this to monitor if these services are auto-opening or auto-selecting email links. It’s a great sender reputation indicator.

Thanks Shane - just received this response from AC:

Hello Scott,

After investigating, I can say that the elevated openings and click-through rate on their campaign send seem to be caused by either security scanner activity or possible bot activity. This is based on our data. For multiple contacts in our database, we are observing opens and click-through rates of multiple email links within the same second or a few seconds following delivery.

A solution to this would be for you to Filter suspected bot clicks within reports to prevent this from happening again.

Based on our logs, the suspected activity appears to be due to bot click activity. Also, I want to suggest you if you would like to be added to the bot click filter beta so that it can be added to your account. You can review information on the bot click filter here.

Feel free to reach out to us if you need any assistance.

Yep. That should help in getting reporting data closer to the truth. As I mentioned, work on your sender reputation with shared sending domains and it will help in other areas. Cheers.

thanks Shane