You Ask, I Answer: How to Remove Email Bot Clicks?

In today's episode, the question is can I explain how to remove auto opens and auto clicks in email marketing? Ah, wonderful. And non-AI question. Okay, so here's how this works. Here's what's going on.

There are a lot of email systems that will automatically open and click on links in emails. And you see this most in corporate firewall, systems like Barracuda, et cetera, where the system is designed to open and click on every link in an email newsletter to check it for malware, to check it for hostile code, et cetera. Things that a person could fall victim to phishing scams, etc. And so these systems will take every single link in an email and click on them all and open them all to validate them. Well, that's good for corporate security, obviously.

That is bad for email marketers. You want to know how many people actually read their email. So here's a way to count to know how to discount the number of auto-opens because it's not just core fit systems, also uh Apple's uh mail privacy systems do this as well uh to some degree. What you want to do is somewhere at the very very bottom of the email in the fine print somewhere, you want to have a tracked link on like a single piece of punctuation. If you look at my newsletter, it's on a single period at the bottom of a uh the newsletter where nobody is going to click on.

No human has any reason to click on that, especially if it's if it's on a text link where the period is a separate link from the rest of the link. So you might say, you know, unsubscribe here, and that is the link that goes to the unsubscribe page. And then the period at the end has a separate link to somewhere else. That separate link can go just to your home page, you know, it doesn't matter, but what you want it to do is you want to have it uh have good tracking codes on it, and then in your email tracking software, you track the number of clicks that that link has gotten. That's why you need good tracking codes on it.

So let's say you have a newsletter that went out and you have 6,000 clicks on it. And that period link at the very, very end, that contains like a hundred clicks. So you know that a hundred non-humans clicked on that particular little period link, and you can be almost certain that those are not real. That's how you know the number of people who the number of non-humans who've clicked on that link. And then what you do is in your reporting in your stats, and you probably have to do this manually because it's not something that uh our email software is designed to do.

Um, you basically say, okay, deduct from all the link tracking for our newsletter, deduct you know the hundred or so clicks that that uh validation link got because you know they're not real. So your email newsletter got six thousand clicks. Um it actually got you know, if you've got a hundred clicks on the validation link, you got 5,900 clicks on that newsletter. You did not kill all 6,000 because the robots were part of those. So that's how you do that.

It's a very straightforward process. You do have to do it manually uh if your email system does not support it. Um there are certain email marketing software packages, particularly open source ones like Mautic, the marketing automation software, where you could, if you wanted to, you could build a plugin that would do that kind of tracking and deduction automatically. Uh, and that'd be an opportunity if you use generative AI coding tools to put something like that together. But out of the box, I don't believe there are any vendors that currently do that sort of automatic deduction.

I wish there were, because it would make reporting more clean, but it doesn't exist today. So that's the process for doing that. Give it a try. I would use the native link tracking inside your uh your email marketing and marketing automation system. I would not use, I would tag them with things like Google Analytics tags for sure, but I would not use them, uh Google Analytics to track that because there's no guarantee that the person, if it's if it's a very privacy-sensitive organization, there is no guarantee that the system that will their systems will even let Google Analytics run.

And so it's kind of it would be pointless to do that. So that's the process. Thanks for the question. Talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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Penn is one of the world's leading experts on AI and marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, particularly for uses of AI in marketing, AI and consulting, AI and management consulting, AI and business, AI strategy. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers, An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an internationally renowned AI keynote speaker around the world. Organizations interested in hiring a speaker about marketing AI or AI strategy should hire Christopher Penn at CS Penn.