Have you noticed an unexpected increase in opens within your email campaigns? Or more unusual clicks or engagement from different places around the globe? This might largely be due to non-human clicks – also known as machine clicks.
What are non-human clicks?
Non-human clicks happen when security software systems – like virus scanners and enterprise firewalls – check the validity of links in an email before or after delivering it to the inbox. These systems may click on some or all of the links within an email and as a result, determine whether to deliver the email to the inbox or to junk it as spam.
How can non-human clicks impact your campaigns?
While there are benefits to this type of software (i.e. reducing the chance of attacks or phishing attempts to a recipient’s inbox), it can also become a burden for some email marketers who want to determine if some – or all – of the data being collected has been impacted. This type of software can also produce inflated open rates or clicks, which are created by machines and not humans.
Pairing that with additional privacy protection measures, such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection, can make it more challenging to determine the true success of your efforts.
How can you help me address non-human machine clicks?
To combat this challenge, Marigold is introducing a new non-human click filter that will automatically identify and drop all non-human clicks from our various reports. We are also providing a summary of the number of clicks removed from each campaign by the filter, so you can see at a glance that the filter is active and doing its job.
Removing non-human clicks will also improve the accuracy of features like engagement and location-based segments and send time optimization.
What does this mean for the future of my email marketing efforts?
Skewed email data is affecting many marketers, which is vital to improving how you connect with your subscribers. Not knowing whether a human or server took an action can lead to inaccurate data and incorrect segmentation. It may also make it more difficult to accurately determine engagement and campaign success, which makes measuring your ROI even more difficult.
Ultimately, marketers will gain peace of mind knowing that the operation of this filter cuts out the noise and shows real human activity. Our new functionality will help you identify the non-human clicks that may occur within your email campaigns and highlight them separately on your report, which will help you base future business decisions on real data from your real subscribers.
The non-human click filter is an advanced feature that can be separately added by Campaign Monitor by Marigold customers to the Essentials/Unlimited or Premier plans.
Learn more about enabling feature add-ons or request a demo.