Smart metrics tracking and usage

Bot-generated opens and clicks are an email marketers' headache. To tackle this, Deploia built innovative metrics tracking so marketers can get a better overview of their email campaign's performance.

Background

Marketers can tweak content based on how well their email campaigns engage recipients, as determined by the open/click rate. Security firms use software to guard networks and identify malicious communications. Pre-clicking every link in an email is one way to spot harmful websites before they are delivered. This distorts marketing stats by generating fictitious openings and clicks.

Although Deploia had attempted to detect bots via user-agent filtering, this approach needed to be revised. As a result, we created an increasingly advanced and trustworthy technique to exclude bot activity and give you a truer picture of how your email campaign performed.

Deploia's Smart Tracking feature

Our implementation consists of these key elements:

• An ignore list tracks IPs flagged by trap rules, with a status column defaulting to active.

• Deploia can deactivate mistakenly added legitimate IPs to allow future action recording.

• Emails contain a hidden link that, when clicked, logs the action in the ignore list.

A three-step validation process for actions:

• Compare against the ignore list

• Evaluate the time since email delivery (opens/clicks within 30 seconds may indicate bots)

• Count actions in a set timeframe (over 5 actions in 10 seconds suggest bot activity)

How do I use it?

When setting up your email campaign, on Step #2, you will see "Campaign tracking options" (See our guide on "setting up an email campaign"). In that section, you will see two fields—Smart open tracking and Smart click tracking. Enable them by setting those to "Yes". This feature is still undergoing testing—use it with caution.

Enabling this option for "test" campaigns is NOT recommended. If Deploia detects criteria matching the bot activity, your IP might be added to the ignore list. If your IP has been added to the ignore list, get in touch with us so we can remove it.