Why am I seeing a sudden increase in bot click activity in my email campaigns?

Email marketer from Reddit responds that corporate security software often clicks links in emails to check for malicious content. This can cause a large spike in clicks, particularly from internal IP ranges. Check IP addresses, user agents and timing of the clicks

Email marketer from StackExchange explains that a sudden increase in bot clicks could be due to new email security measures implemented by recipient email providers. These systems automatically click links to check for malicious sites, resulting in inflated click-through rates. Check the user agent of the requests.

Email marketer from Email Geeks asks whether the clicks are unique or total, and if recipients are clicking all available links once or multiple times.

Email marketer from MarketingProfs explains that email pre-fetching by mailbox providers and security software could be the reason for a spike in clicks. They share that filtering by IP can help in some situations but it is not always reliable

Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that identifying bot traffic involves analyzing IP addresses, user agents, and behavioral patterns like unusually high click-through rates or clicks occurring at odd hours. He suggests using tools like Google Analytics to segment and filter out bot traffic.

Email marketer from Litmus responds that Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) can inflate click rates as it pre-loads email content. This can register as a click even if the recipient doesn't actually engage with the links. They recommend segmenting Apple Mail users and analyzing their engagement separately.

Email marketer from SparkPost responds that a surge in clicks might be due to mailbox providers improving their pre-fetch link checking capabilities. They suggest monitoring engagement metrics and adjusting sending practices accordingly, but don't worry too much about it because it isn't real.

Email marketer from EmailOversight.com shares that a sudden surge in click activity might stem from new security software being implemented by receiving mail servers, automated security scans that pre-fetch links to detect threats, or even competitors attempting to skew your engagement metrics.

Expert from Email Geeks offers to analyze the recipient domains to identify potential patterns using their filter tool.

Expert from Email Geeks shares that of the top 10 domains in Paul’s list, 8 of them are all cloud hosted at one spam filter.

Expert from Spam Resource explains that a sudden spike in clicks, especially if concentrated around a specific time or originating from unusual locations/IPs, could be indicative of bot activity or click fraud. She recommends investigating IP addresses and User Agents to identify suspicious patterns.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests checking for Apple desktop OS and Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and checking the user agent/device behind the clicks to help diagnose the increase in click activity.

Expert from Word to the Wise discusses how understanding the types of spam traps and bot behaviours helps in preventing and identifying them. One way to improve click rates and get them back to their real levels is to review your process and make sure that a human is filling in all of the lead data. This helps in identifying if your data sourcing might be adding bots to your database.

Documentation from IETF.org explains the robots.txt exclusion protocol. While primarily used for web crawling, understanding how bots are *supposed* to behave (respecting robots.txt) helps identify those that are malicious and disregard it, thus contributing to unwanted click activity.

Documentation from Cloudflare describes their bot management tools, which analyze HTTP requests to identify and mitigate bot traffic. It includes methods for challenging suspicious traffic and blocking malicious bots to improve the accuracy of website and email campaign analytics.

Documentation from Google Analytics explains how to use bot filtering within the platform to exclude traffic from known bots and spiders. This helps to get a more accurate picture of human user engagement with email campaigns by removing automated traffic from reports.