I see that a lot of bots are clicking on links in my emails

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I see that a lot of bots are clicking on links in my emails What should I do?

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Hi @animamundi. Welcome to the community. Automatic clicks are an industry wide problem. But, they do this to look after their users. I find that the better the sender reputation, the fewer automatic clicks. This is especially true when sending to Gmail / Google Workspace or Yahoo Mail recipients. Depending on how may emails you send to Gmail recipients, you may try looking at Google Postmaster Tools for information on how they perceive you as a sender. One strategy that can be used is to insert your own hidden monitoring link. If a ‘normal’ link and the monitoring link is clicked ignore the link click. It will still show up in reports thought. I hope that helps. Again, welcome. Cheers. Shane

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First of all, welcome!

Read this article first. https://help.activecampaign.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021819560-Why-does-my-campaign-have-so-many-link-clicks

You’ll likely find they are corporate emails (not free personal emails like gmail, yahoo, etc).

As far as what to do, it depends on what kind of impact the bot link clicks are having as to how much time you spend on it.

Specific solutions to consider:

  • Consider reducing the number of links in your email.
  • Consider segmenting your list by corporate or personal emails (I add a custom field for this, and created an automation that looks at the email to identify if corporate or personal and then updates the field).

Then send separate emails for 2 different segments - corporate and personal. The corporate especially should have no more than 1-2 links to your website.

  • Consider sending at regular times (during the business day).

General solutions:
Make sure your domain authentication is still correct
Send at a consistent frequency (no radical change right now)

None of these are “official” solutions but I have had 2 clients who have had this issue in the last week. 1 client is experimenting with these ideas after having 1 email trigger a large number of bot clicks. So far so good.

I will also mention that AC has a private beta program that will add the capability to some reporting to filter out bot clicks. It is helpful to confirm that you do have this problem but if you are reading this, you probably already have the problem. We requested and added the bot click beta and are now using it to monitor if our changes are having an impact. So far so good.

The filtering is similar to filtering for apple privacy opens that you already have on your campaign reports.

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