Adobe Analytics clicks higher thank email clicks

[jantzen_belliston-Adobe]

Hi,

I am doing a number of email campaigns and seeing reasonable clicks in my email reports but then I check my traffic via Adobe Analytics and the unique page views are coming in almost triple of the clicks to my email. And the majority of those extra clicks are coming from the same 5-7 cities per the geosegmentation. Those cities are not in our target markets and they keep coming up no matter the segment of the list we mail to. What is happening? Click farm? Bots? What can I do about this. These numbers are throwing off my reporting. Thoughts? 

Thanks

[jantzen_belliston-Adobe]

Do any of the answers below answer your initial question? If so, can you select one of them as the correct answer? If none of the answers already provided answer your question, can you provide additional information to better help the community solve your question?

[#3]

When you mentioned the "click" number is bigger than email click numbers, according to my exp. there are 2 possibilities:

1. Is the "page view" in Adobe is included on Visit level? Which means, any landing visit from email campaign and all the sequential clicks. If yes, that's reasonable since all the clicks happened in the visit lead by one email campain will be included.

2. Campaign email was forwarded by recipients to someone else, or artifical traffic (bot traffice)

2.1 check with your email vendor if they are able to provide information about how many times the email is forwarded

2.2 if you are recording email user info (in encrypt), check unique ID or the default Adobe Marketing Unique Visitor ID and IP/Cities info. We used to use a way to find those traffic to identify the bot traffic, e.g. Level 1 suspicious bot traffic: same Visitor ID pageviews from different cities within 1 mins.

in the last, you may need to check the "click" from email is unique click or just clicks.

[#4]

You can look for certain IPs or suspicious hits in the raw data (Data Feeds) and see if there is something strange. It could be a bot activity resulting in a spike in page views.

[David-123]

First, the usual caveat applies: don't expect numbers to match between different analytics systems, even for something as "basic" as clicks.

With that out of the way…

Your case is peculiar, though, where AA reports bigger numbers than your email system. Given what you've described, I'm inclined to agree that that looks like bot traffic.

You can raise this issue with Adobe Client Care to see what they say. However, don't mention that you're comparing with another system, otherwise they'll just say that you shouldn't compare AA with other systems and close your ticket immediately. Instead, tell them your finding about the unusual number of pageviews coming from the same 5 locations and how they look like bot traffic.

[David-123]

To further reiterate on this, I used to work for a web analytics vendor. Comparing to other systems will never give the same number.

With that out of the way and based on what you have said - I would overlay domain against cities in workspace. This will show you if there any suspicious bots (such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS).