{"id":16035,"date":"2021-02-08T16:44:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-08T16:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emailmovers.auracreativemedia.co.uk\/?p=16035"},"modified":"2021-02-08T16:44:29","modified_gmt":"2021-02-08T16:44:29","slug":"are-your-emails-getting-bot-clicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seotester.auracreativemedia.co.uk\/index.php\/2021\/02\/08\/are-your-emails-getting-bot-clicks\/","title":{"rendered":"Are your emails getting bot clicks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Introduction<\/h2>\n

With the growth of email phishing attacks – i.e. emails designed to draw you to malicious sites designed to steal important personal information such as usernames and passwords, security companies have developed software solutions to help protect networks and identify these potentially harmful emails.<\/p>\n

The above is a good thing!\u00a0 We don’t want anyone to fall foul of a phishing attack – that is obvious and these email security companies are doing a great job!<\/p>\n

One of the techniques used by these innovative software solutions is to follow each and every link in each and every email received in order to identify any potentially harmful websites before passing non-threatening email on to the recipient.\u00a0 Any threats will be quarantined.<\/p>\n

One of the issues that causes legitimate email marketers a potential issue with this type of solution is “bot clicks”.\u00a0 It looks like the your email campaign has had a 20% click to open rate when infact a portion of these clicks are automated.\u00a0 Potentially, a large portion.<\/p>\n

This can cause us challenges if we are using automations to follow up with people who have opened and\/or clicked on one of our emails either with an email automation or perhaps even a phone call.\u00a0 Naturally, our reporting will all be wrong too.\u00a0 In short, we may think we have had 340 clicks when in reality we have only had 212 or depending on the makeup of your list, 12?\u00a0 And what about remarketing campaigns designed to retarget website visitors?[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Research in to the problem<\/h2>\n

To test how widespread the issue of bot clicks could be we realised that these systems would click on every link, not just certain links within the email.\u00a0 The only link many won’t click on are the unsubscribe links.\u00a0 Therefore, we inserted a hidden link in to an email campaign we sent to approximately 263,114 contacts in November 2020.\u00a0 This particular campaign had no other links in it other than the unsubscribe link.\u00a0 The email was designed to generate a reply, not a click.\u00a0 We concealed the link behind a full stop at the end of one of the paragraphs.<\/p>\n

In total we tracked 911 clicks on this concealed link.\u00a0 Of these clicks we identified that 645 were unique.<\/p>\n

We could argue that some of the clicks could have been human however it is difficult to identify how many could have been genuine, also, it is important to note that after the security software clicks and identifies the email as safe then it releases the email to the user and the user could have clicked through on it.<\/p>\n

However, for the purposes of this test we have disregarded these potentially genuine clicks.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Test Results<\/h2>\n

After the email campaign had finished and we had downloaded the results – i.e. a list of email addresses that had clicked through on the concealed link we began to research the domains to try and understand what was happening.\u00a0 The research we carried out on each domain was as follows:<\/p>\n

MX Domain Analysis – Who is hosting the email service?\u00a0 Is it Outlook for instance.\u00a0 We identified Google, Outlook and Other as the options.\u00a0 Other contains anything that is not Google or Outlook.\u00a0 We want to understand what services are creating bot clicks.<\/p>\n

The results were as follows:<\/p>\n

Total email addresses that clicked: 646<\/div>\n
Total email addresses analysed for MX: 536<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0messagelabs.com<\/a>: 87<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0barracudanetworks.com<\/a>: 1<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0mimecast.com<\/a>: 2<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0pphosted.com<\/a>: 11<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0fireeyecloud.com<\/a>: 66<\/div>\n
MX Domain contains\u00a0email.net<\/a>: 95<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
As we can see from the above results, Google and Outlook don’t appear anywhere however there were reports as recently as March 2020 of I.P. addresses like 122.149.3.4 (which shows up as cache.google.com) appearing on unsubscribe reports which might suggest Google was clicking on links in emails to Gmail users in order to cache the page but simultaneously unsubscribing the user.\u00a0 The free email service providers do not appear to offer the same level of scrutiny as the commercial email providers.\u00a0 This could however be due to concerns over privacy, for instance do you want Google or Microsoft clicking on every link in every email sent to you private gmail?\u00a0 I suspect this could be a difficult area.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Email.net and messagelabs.com appear in the #1 and #2 positions.<\/div>\n

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Actions<\/h2>\n

From the above results we can determine that a company with email lists containing email addresses managed by email.net and messagelabs.com will be seeing a distortion in their reporting.\u00a0 The above test also demonstrates that in this case just email.net and messagelabs.com affected 182 addresses.<\/p>\n

Should I remove emails from my list that are managed by email.net and\/or messagelabs.com?<\/p>\n

In short, no however you may want to consider limiting any automation activity from these users as it’s likely not authentic and a waste of resources.<\/p>\n

What could this waste look like?<\/p>\n