Filtering Email Bot Activity in Reporting

Question

Hi,

We are experiencing an increasing issue with email bots clicking links in our campaigns and inflating our CTR and Opt Out rates in our performance indicators. We see many recipients in the tracking logs with clicks on multiple links within the same second. Is there any way to filter these from the reporting within V7?

This is really impacting our ability to see what email comms are resonating with our audiences or not.

Manually extracting tracking logs and looking for these activities and removing them is not practical for all campaigns, but they are massively overinflating our stats. At first glance, the stats for one of our campaigns doesn't look too far our from industry benchmarks, but the unsubscription rate is 30x typical for us

Manually extracting the tracking logs and removing those that have clicked multiple times within the same second, tells a completely different picture, with our click through rate being below the benchmark for our industry.

Is there any way to exclude bot clicks in our tracking reports so we can see our CTR, Open Rate & Opt Out clicks that were not performed within seconds to get a better idea of how our campaigns are performing?

Craig_Thonis · Accepted Answer

Hi Daniellee,

There is an active investigation with Product Management into updating the product to be able to identify and filter out these issues. That said, others in the community have proposed several solutions below:

Suggestions:
https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-analytics-questions/bot-traffic-filtering-query/td-p/329289

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-campaign-classic-questions/filtering-email-bot-activity-in-adobe-campaign-classic/td-p/434342

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-analytics-questions/bot-filtering-using-user-agent/td-p/557521

Another suggestion would be to insert an invisible URL into your email content that human beings would not see. If it gets clicked, you know you have bot traffic and an easier way to isolate the exact count.

To your question about removing bot clicks that occur within a few seconds, you could build out a workflow or use javascript to possibly do this.

That said, the tricky part is still getting this data to display in the reporting regardless of your chosen option. You would likely need to create a separate table to house the clean tracking data and then build a custom report to report on it. While it would theoretically be possible to update the tracking data in the out-of-the-box schemas, it would not be recommended unless you are 100% confident in your filtering logic, as you may end up blowing away legitimate data.

david--garcia · Answer

From what I've researched in the past, the first click/open is always the user event, followed by the ISP's automated clickthrough 2nd and 3rd times within the same second(s), this is the behaviour I've noticed at least in Microsoft.

How about running a technical workflow to perform an hourly maintenance on tracking table to identify and remove the subsequent clicks/opens etc? if the source data is cleansed, then this will reflect automatically in any proccesses referencing these tracking records.

If you want to go a step ahead, you can rather delete the records from the tracking logs and copy them onto a custom schema where they can be used in the future for analysis to be used as reference to identify bot behaviour.

See my reply on thist post, maybe it contains some relevant points.

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-campaign-classic-questions/filtering-email-bot-activity-in-adobe-campaign-classic/m-p/434400/highlight/true

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