Inflated email clicks

When you send emails, some contacts may show inflated clicks, where every link in the email has been clicked within a short period of time. This article explains why this happens, how Force24 helps you spot it and what else you can do about it.

Why do some contacts have inflated clicks?

If this happens, it is likely that a security bot is clicking the links. These bots are designed to protect businesses and users from spam and malicious content reaching their inboxes. They check that an email is safe by validating a potentially suspicious link and checking its integrity.

Unfortunately, this is not a new occurrence. These bots are industry wide and affect every Email Service Provider (ESP), so we can't stop them, because it happens at the receiving end rather than the sending end. It isn't isolated to Force24, and you will likely see the effects of server clicks with other email senders at some level.

How does Force24 help me identify bot clicks?

Force24 marks activity that doesn't look genuine as Non-Human Interaction (NHI), so you can tell it apart from real engagement. You can see NHI in these places:

• Campaign reporting: open the report for a campaign and click the hyperlinked opens or clicks figures to see the NHI breakdown. NHI activity is deducted from your opens, clicks and unique metrics, and the original figures are shown beneath so you can see the difference.
• Report exports: the CSV report includes two extra columns, one showing whether a contact is classed as NHI and one giving the reason.
• Contact activity: a contact's activity lists their campaign clicks and opens and their Web Insights activity, with each one marked as legitimate or NHI. If you disagree with a classification, you can give it a thumbs down so that Force24 can adjust it.
• Contact Search: you can search for NHI clicks and opens, so you can find the contacts affected.

Lead scores are also adjusted, because scores tied to non-human activity are deducted. This means your highest scoring contacts should be genuinely engaged recipients.

What else can I do about bot clicks?

These ideas work alongside NHI. Some of the potential solutions are below.

Dynamic Segments

You can add a hidden link to your emails that isn't visible to the human eye. With a Dynamic Segment, any contact who clicks that link can be added to a Segment, so you can check them and decide whether to exclude or investigate them.

Safe Senders list

Your subscribers are the ones who have security email bots protecting them from spam, so you can ask them to add you to their Safe Senders list. You can ask them directly or include the request in your email.

This helps your emails get through their spam filter and land in their inbox, because you become a trusted contact to their Email Service Provider. Being on a subscriber's Safe Senders list also means your content is considered safe, so the bots may stop checking it.

Lead score weighting

NHI already deducts lead score for non-human activity. To go further, you could also reduce the lead score weighting for clicks, and give a higher weighting to Web Insights activity and Goal URLs when you are prospecting.

Check the health of your data

Sending to inactive or unengaged email addresses can harm your sender reputation. This is considered bad practice for many reasons, but the main one is that anti-spam filters are more likely to see you as a suspicious sender.

We suggest using engagement campaigns or Journeys. Rather than sending to one large Segment, you can apply rules to separate the contacts who engage from those who don't, then set up different campaigns for each audience.

Link to your own website

Try linking only to content on your own website. Receiving email servers often prefer links that match the domain in your sending address. When you include a link to another domain, you are effectively putting your trust in that domain's reputation rather than your own.