Many users have security settings that scan the email and click each link to make sure it leads to a secure website. If the security bot finds something suspicious, it may flag the email or mark it as spam to prevent the recipient from opening it.
Unfortunately, this then may inflate your Journey Reports with 'Bot Clicks' that can be mistaken for authentic engagement. These 'Bot Clicks' can interfere with your Journey Reports, and skew the true engagement numbers you see for each Email sent.
You will see now the option to toggle 'Suspected Bots' on or off on each Email Report page.
Click the toggle shown above on the Report page for one of your Journeys, and you might notice the Opened, Read, and Clicked numbers all decreasing.
If your engagement rates did decrease, that would indicate some of your recipients use a firewall to protect themselves from potentially malicious emails. These security measures will click on any links and check their validity, therefore inflating your report numbers artificially.
However they are legitimate recipients of your emails, so the option is available to display your reports with or without these 'Suspected Bots'.
For your information, here are the rules we use to determine which clicks may be a result of security bots:
Rule 1: Count the total number of links in an email and if the amount of links clicked by a contact match this total, then mark these as 'Suspected Bot' Clicks. This is because a normal user will rarely click every single link in an email (especially combined with the time parameters in Rule 3). Note: This rule is not used if the Email contains less than 3 links in total.
Rule 2: If the number of links in an email is X - and the number of link clicks is greater than X then the first X clicks are marked as 'Suspected Bot' Clicks but the remaining clicks are deemed to be genuine. For example: if there are 8 active links and the contact has 10 link clicks then the first 8 are marked as 'Suspected Bot' Clicks, but the remaining 2 are genuine.
Rule 3: if a contact has multiple link clicks within a [4] second time period and their User Agent is a match, then these are marked as 'Suspected Bot' Clicks.
Note: These rules are always conducted in this order.
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