By far the best metric of success for a marketing campaign is conversions. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to directly correlate total conversions to a specific marketing campaign. This makes it critically important to measure and track the metrics that can be associated with every campaign you run.  

For an email marketing campaign, there are two broad categories of metrics to track.   

Deliverability metrics 

Deliverability is all about ensuring that the message you sent is received by your customers. 

Meaning it: 

• includes the right email address. 
• doesn’t bounce. 
• isn’t rejected by the ISP as spam. 
• gets delivered to the recipient’s inbox. 

Best practices to improve deliverability metrics: send only to known users who want to hear from you, have a good domain and IP reputation, and ensure that your message doesn’t contain a subject line or content which will lead an ISP to mistake it for spam.  

Engagement metrics  

The engagement metrics track how the recipients of your message are engaging with it. How many readers open the email? How many click on the contents of the mail?  These metrics measure three key rates:  

Open Rate: The percentage of emails delivered and opened 

The Open Rate will historically provide a perspective on how successful you were at convincing the recipients to look at your email. Remember, due to Apple’s privacy changes in 2021, open rates may be be inflated. Read more on that here.  

Click to Open: The percentage of emails opened that resulted in a click 

The Click to Open rate can tell you if the content of an email was compelling, and the call to action was clear and interesting for recipients to click on. 

Click Through: The percentage of emails delivered that resulted in a click 

The Click Through rate is the combination of the above two, and although this is important to track and understand, it can be hard to know what you need to change if it’s low.  

The bot click challenge  

The use of client-side email security appliances has made the click rate harder to interpret correctly. These appliances are typically installed (as physical boxes or as connectors to a cloud-based service) into a client’s email server. The purpose of the security appliance is to verify that all emails received are legitimate and safe to pass on to the recipients.   

The challenge is that over the past year, Acoustic has noticed a significant increase in the rate of links which have been followed (invoked) by email security appliances.  

It's important to emphasize that this “bot” activity is not being executed with nefarious intent; the appearance of bot clicking is not an indicator that your network has been hacked into. However, the bot clicks do appear in the logs to be legitimate recipient behavior, and so the “bot clicks” have the inadvertent consequence of significantly but artificially inflating your click rates. 

Because the bot clicks are being generated by security appliances, there are no clearly defined indicators that can be used to definitively identify them; there are no unique headers or user-agent values which indicate if a click came from a security appliance and not a human.   

There are, however, patterns which are strongly suggestive that a click is not human originated. We can see in the data that a very frequent pattern is for multiple “clicks” to be received near-simultaneously from the same user, sometimes for as many as all of the links in the email. When this pattern is repeated at scale, it becomes nearly definitive that the multiple clicks are coming from a security appliance (a bot click) and not from a human. 

The impact of the bot clicks can vary significantly depending on the types of recipients you contact. The good news is if you are a B2C company, and the majority of the recipients you contact are consumers, you’re less likely to be seriously impacted by these security appliance bot clicks.   

The story is more challenging for B2B companies, and for those whose primary recipient base have domains which are hosted by companies, organizations, and institutions. We can see in the data that those types of domains are much more likely to have a security appliance installed, as the frequency of suspected bot clicks is MUCH higher from those domains.  

If you have concerns about the click rate that you are currently seeing, contact your Customer Success Manager and ask for a manual review of your data. This can help with understanding the frequency and prevalence of bot clicks in your data, and amongst the recipients that you target.