AJO/CJA recording 61 clicks for one profile, with many link events occurring within the same second?

Question

We are investigating unexpected email click-count behavior in Adobe Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics.

For one email recipient, CJA displays:

61 Total Clicks
1 Unique Click

The profile’s email interaction data contains 20 message.tracking click events associated with the same profile, message execution, batch instance, campaign, and message.

Here are some findings from within those records. Each click event has a different event _id. There are 19 distinct link labels and urlID values. The recorded links include buttons, ticket links, social links, app-store links, an Add to Calendar link, and other destinations throughout the email. All 20 events occurred between 22:38:45.166 and 22:38:46.383, a period of approximately 1.2 seconds. One link was recorded twice; the remaining events represent different links. Every event has "isBot": false

We also reviewed the HTML used for the send. The links are represented as separate anchor elements, and the buttons reviewed do not contain nested anchor tags. Many of the links also have separate labels and destination.

How do we fix this? We are not seeing this issue across all of our emails which is bizarre. It’s happening to multiple profiles within emails. Our numbers are incredibly inflated because of this duplication issue. We do not have confidence in the data at the moment and it is a problem.

SatheeskannaK · Answer

Hi ​@genna.williamsonThis isn't a tracking bug — it's automated link-scanning by email security systems (e.g., Microsoft Safe Links, Proofpoint, Mimecast) that many corporate/ISP mail environments use. When an email lands, these systems automatically "click" every link in the message to check for malware, all within about a second of delivery. That matches exactly what you're seeing: 20 clicks across nearly every link in the email, all within 1.2 seconds — no human clicks 19 different links (including social icons and a calendar link) that fast.Why it shows "isBot: false": These scanners deliberately mimic real browsers so they can fully inspect the destination page, which lets them slip past standard bot-detection lists. So the flag being false doesn't mean it's human — it just means it didn't match a known bot signature.Why it's inconsistent across emails: It only affects recipients whose company/ISP runs this kind of link-scanning security. So it'll show up more with certain email domains, not with the campaign or template itself.Why "Unique Clicks" still shows 1: That metric counts whether the person clicked anything at all, not per-link. So it's not wrong — the inflation is specifically in the Total Clicks number.I recommend opening a ticket with Adobe support to ask about adding or improving bot detection, as the current filtering mechanism is not effective in identifying this issue.You can set up derived fields if possible to create a temporary fix. This will allow us to flag or exclude clicks that occur within a couple of seconds of another click from the same person. This way, our click-through numbers will accurately reflect genuine engagement.In the meantime, treat Total Clicks as inflated for affected sends and rely on Unique Clicks or deduped metrics for reporting.

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