Bot click filtering

As a marketer, measuring campaign success relies heavily on clicks, which indicate customer engagement. However, the rapid growth of digital marketing has attracted malicious activities like phishing, resulting in the rise of security measures to combat such threats.

The issue with bot clicks

Unfortunately, these security measures often generate synthetic or bot clicks when scanning incoming messages for security purposes. These bot clicks artificially inflate engagement metrics, with industry estimates ranging from 20% to 90%, making it challenging to gauge campaign effectiveness accurately.

Blueshift perspective

Based on our extensive experience working with a diverse group of marketers from different industries, we have observed:

• All clicks originate externally, outside the Blueshift platform, whether from bots or humans.
• We do not generate synthetic data to boost engagement reports.
• Identifying bot clicks is complex due to the lack of universal bot click signatures. Filtering out bot clicks may risk eliminating genuine human clicks.
• Heuristics based on click patterns to filter bot clicks cannot be scaled across all campaigns and all periods of time. Hence, we do not recommend this approach as a scalable solution.

Introducing bot click filtering

To address this challenge, Blueshift introduces 'bot click filtering,' a feature designed to help marketers differentiate between bot and human-generated clicks, providing more accurate campaign performance insights.

How It works

At Blueshift, we leverage CloudFlare's Enterprise Bot Management module to score incoming clicks based on the likelihood of their origin—whether from a bot or a genuine human user. Any click event with a score less than 30 will be flagged as a potential 'bot.'

Identifying bot clicks

• Campaign Activity Reports: Click events flagged as potential 'bot' activity will appear under the 'clicked_by' attribute within the 'extended_attributes' section of the campaign activity reports.
• Custom Reports with Insights: When generating campaign performance reports using our Insights feature, you can group and filter clicks by the 'clicked_by' attribute. Here's an example of how you can measure the impact of bot activity on your campaign performance using Insights reports.
• Segmentation: When segmenting customers’ messaging activity, you can target or exclude customers based on detected bot click activity using the 'clicked_by' attribute. Explore an example segment that identifies customer profiles with bot click activity.

Impact on predictive modeling

Bot clicks are excluded from contributing to engagement signals used for evaluating features like Engage Time Optimization or Predictive Scoring. This ensures that synthetic clicks do not skew AI model training.

Minimizing email bot clicks

Eliminating bot clicks entirely may be challenging in today's digital landscape, but implementing certain strategies can significantly reduce their impact on your email campaigns.

• Custom CNAME for Click Tracking Links: Utilize white-labeled click-tracking links by setting up a custom CNAME (Canonical Name) to replace the default Blueshift-encoded link format (e.g., links.getblueshift.com) with your brand's domain (e.g., links.yourdomain.com). This customization enhances link trustworthiness and reduces the likelihood of bot clicks from recipients' organizations, as they recognize and trust your brand's domain.
• Avoid External Links and URL Shorteners: Avoid external website links and URL shorteners in your emails to minimize suspicion from organizations. These practices can trigger validation checks by security applications, potentially leading to bot clicks.
• Maintain Strong Sender Reputation: Focus on maintaining a positive sender reputation and good overall deliverability. A reputable sender status improves email deliverability and reduces the likelihood of organizations validating link safety through bot clicks.

By implementing these strategies, you can proactively minimize the impact of bot clicks in your email campaigns, ensuring more accurate engagement metrics and fostering trust with your recipients.