Hi @jstasse,
Sending you a direct message to follow up on that support ticket.
Cheers,
Jake
We have noticed similar patterns when sending marketing emails to goverment agencies specially airport administration and Department of Transportation (DOT). It appears all the members of the organizations open or click the email. In turn, this data gets reported under the email performance metrics. Does the new filter work with these types of accounts? This will help us have more accurate reporting of email performance and clicks.
Thank you -- any further updates or insights on these metrics and bot behaviors now that so many recipients have been working from home and not necessarily logging in via a VPN, instead relying on their home wifi IP?
Hello! I think a super effective solution here would be to do the following:
1. Add an invisible clickable hyperlink in the email somewhere that only a bot would recognize and click
2. Be able to filter email analytics to prevent clicks being tracked on any individual email send that has that unique link clicked. This would prevent it from adding click history to contacts, and exclude the numbers there from being included in analytics
Agree -- not sure with HubSpot isn’t just productizing a work-around solution like that!
hi drosenbaum, i’m followwing this topic feverishly to improve our analytics. we have the bot filter turned on. i’m curious how you did this:
1. Add an invisible clickable hyperlink in the email somewhere that only a bot would recognize and click
I did not implement this, it was only an idea I had. I would think you could implement this by having a hyperlinkink where the text is white on a white background. Humans wouldnt notice it and would not be likely to click it, but a clickbot would certainly notice it and click it. The idea would be that any emails where that link is clicked we can be reasonably sure it was a bot. The next issue is how to parse that info out in HubSpot which I am not sure is possible as of now
We did implement and invisible image and labeled the URL as “…/honeypot.”
That’s been helpful to determine which companies are using bots. We also created a workflow that looks at the email click/open activity time stamps because we realize bots have predictable behavior in that the timestamps for delivered/open/click1,2,3,4 (however many buttons and hyperlinks you have regardless of whether they are HTML or plan text, including the honeypot) activities are all within the same minute of delivered or 2 minutes max.
We created a workflow to create an active list of any recipients who have opens or clicks one day after or longer after. We are using this as our actual engagement metrics and those are these people who get the next touch in the workflow for "responders. " It’s a much smaller number of recipients than the clicks/opens that show up in the performance report, but it’s at least more trustable/true/accurate. I’m going to post this workaround/trick at the end of this thread so all can see it - we are just starting to implement it with sends going out today. I’m curious what you think about this method and if you see any ‘gotchas’ - I really appreciate you responding to my reply, it’s been feeling like the lonely wilderness out here trying to figure this out.
How can I report suspected bot activity?
One of our accounts seems to have a security bot that contributes to most of our email clicks, but Hubspot hasn’t filtered it out. For every newsletter we send, every contact from one account opens the email and clicks some links. This skews our CTR metrics a lot, and sometimes this account is responsible for all the clicks on a given newsletter. As much as I’d like for every contact in an account to be clicking our links, I think it’s likely due to a bot, especially considering it’s an account that we don’t have much direct communication with.
Is there anything Hubspot can do to investigate this? I want our data to be more accurate.
Hi @ASmith655,
Welcome to the Community!
Like seen in this post here, our team has bot filtering for both sales and marketing emails setup. However, these can still slip through the cracks as Hannah from our Product team has described. She also noted that if you have any specific repeatable examples, it may be best to reach out to HubSpot Support for further troubleshooting!
In the meantime, we can also see if this one company is appearing in bot filtering within marketing email analytics - like seen in our KB Article here!
I hope this helps point you in the right direction!
Sam, Community Manager
Hi,
I was shocked to see Hubspot reporting 70% open rate within a few seconds of sending the mail and all of them were opened by the same browser at the same time.
This was especially surprising because you would not find so many people sitting in front of computer at 4.45 am. Please check this bug.
Hi @anandkjain,
Do you have bot filtering turned on in your HubSpot account?
If you do and are still having issues then go ahead and fill out a support ticket. The issue does not originate in HubSpot’s reporting but from recipients inboxes. It is bots (google image cache, security software, etc.) that are actually loading the embedded pixel we use to track email opens. Still, we work to keep your data as clean as possible.
Cheers,
Jake
Hello
Thanks for the update ..I must say that this issue is the single most irritating and frustrating problem I am encountering. It prevents us from seeing accurate data. Too bad you can’t resolve it
Hi Jake,
I’ve had a support ticket open for this for quite a while, having escalated it through our Account Manager, and the response is that nothing can be done except the improvements being gradually made.
Working in regulated B2B spaces our email engagement reporting, and any automation that relies on it, is currently useless. With over 50% of our ‘engagement’ being false we’ve had to strip opens and clicks out of Lead Scoring and rely on page views (to my knowledge these are still reliable, but we will lose anybody denying/blocking cookies).
Needless to say this is significantly denting the usefulness of a significant part of HubSpot’s ‘Marketing Hub’, I am suprised that more of HubSpot’s B2B customers aren’t up in arms about this. Without any mechanism to report and improve the bot filtering, and no transparency over the timeline or existence of any planned changes, this must be weighing heavily on the renewal decisions of quite a few customers.
In a B2B marketing environment, Click Rate has become the most unreliable matric. If Hubspot can find a way to exclude data of those clicks which happen within 60 seconds from the time email is sent, I think the majority of fake data will be eliminated from the report. This is the simplest thing HubSpot can do.
Hi @jaleonard19 ,
We’re suffering from the same issue, clicks are becoming unreliable metric to count on for qualifying & scoring leads.
Something in particular we noticed that wasn’t mentioned here before is Plain text clicks.
Our logo link (1st link usually in our emails) is recording more clicks than all other links combined which obviously doesn’t make sense, so upon checking we noticed that HTML clicks are normal (a bit on logo then majority on the rest, banners, CTAs…etc.) However, when checking Plain text clicks, we noticed that in most cases there’s only our logo in that section with significant amount of clicks. Our bot filtering feature is activated yet we still see that.
For example: one email recorded 411 clicks on our logo link, 390 of those are under Plain text. Another emial recorded 375 clicks on our logo link, 359 under Plain text. The more recent we check, the worse the trend gets.
Across 2020, plain text clicks made almost 50% of our total clicks on average. Last half of 2020 the average got over 60%.
Do you think this is also an indicator of bot clicks? If so, is there any way we can build a Workflow that only qualifies leads who clicked on any link except our logo (which we can use as a ghost link, thanks @Mike_Donnelly !) after 5 or more minutes of receiving the email. (assuming most bots are clicking immediately upon receving)
Do you think this would help us reduce the amount of leads that gain false score?
Cheers,
Maen
Hi Maen,
I have dealt with this on several occasions now. It has been tied to schools and business email addresses in my case. As I dug into this, I connected the culprit email addresses to the use of Microsoft Azure & AWS. This is extraneous but interesting information, in my opinion.
As I’ve been brushing up on this topic and trying to get more answers, I came across these two articles that I felt were good resources to help explain the issue to my superiors.
Barracuda: https://assets.barracuda.com/assets/docs/dms/Bot_Attacks_report_vol1_EN.pdf
eSputnik: How to Detect Bots in Email Marketing Campaigns | eSputnik Blog
Unfortunately, even with all of the research I have currently done, I still do not feel confident in explaining the behavior. Like you, I, too, have seen the inflation of clicks centered around the first URL presented in the plain text version of the email, but I have not found any blogs or whitepapers that call out the plain text version specifically.
Now, I have found a solution to cut down on both the inflated clicks and the subsequent inflated sessions, but that doesn’t explain why this started or what action I should take regarding the culprit’s email account. I have assumed that security bots cause this behavior. Therefore I shouldn’t remove the contacts as the end-user will have an opportunity to see the email after internal firewalls complete the spam checks, but is this an accurate assumption? Is continuing to email these contacts detrimental to deliverability and list health? Why does an issue like this all of a sudden occur? Also, why is the behavior not 100% consistent from one campaign send to the next? I would think that all email addresses associated with a domain that has shown this behavior would display the same behavior, but that has not appeared to be the case for us. Lots of puzzling questions, but here is one for you. Have you been able to gather any more details about your scenario?
On a different note, my solution to combat this issue has been to make the first clickable link a “View email in browser” URL. Now, I use an alternate ESP and do not know if this will be a viable solution for you on Hubspot, but I figured it was worth sharing. The ESP I am on doesn’t count clicks associated with “View email in browser” URLs; therefore, the reporting and list segmentation issues have cleared up. Additionally, since the first URL is no longer a page on our eCommerce website, the inflated GA session counts we were experiencing have significantly reduced volume (I’ve only implemented the above solution in blast/batch emails).
Look forward to hearing from you or anyone else that may have more insight.
- Inga
Hey Inga,
Thank you so much for such a detailed reply, this is helpful and I feel
your frustration.
We actually moved to Marketo and now I’m just looking at the numbers as we
send out our first few emails using our dedicated IP. It seems like things
are going well, I would assume the dedicate IP would help a bit from a
sender reputation standpoint. I don’t see super high open rate or click
rate so hopefully problem solved.
The ESP “open in email browser” trick is really smart though, I’ll keep it
in mind for future.
Thanks again,
Maen
I’m getting a little concerned for HubSpot here. They do a fantastic job at making email engagement analysis very easy and powerful, with great reporting layout and tools to make performance comparision. However, the currency that makes this machine run is the engagement data itself and it’s becoming increasingly unreliable.
On a call with multiple HubSpot employees we were not able to find a single email metric: opens, clicks, web page views, even email read time that was reliable enough for us to base behavioural triggers or reporting on. Our stats are so inflated we have little idea of how we are really performing and so instead of being enabled, we are really flying data blind - our instruments are giving us false readings. As a marketer that’s a scary thing, we may think that our email content is really hitting home, where in fact there’s been little real engagement at all. We may pass on ‘hot’ leads onto Sales for them to lose confidence in what we are sending their way as all this ‘engagement’ amounts to 0 new conversations’.
A good example of how this fake data erodes HubSpot’s platform is the Email Health tool. A real value add that allows you to review your entire email marketing operation with a few clicks. However, it’s completely useless for us because as all the building blocks (engagement data) going into it are inflated, the results we pull out cannot be trusted.
As we work in B2B financial services we are facing the highest email security, so others in the post may not have the issue to the same degree, but given HubSpot as a platform is built on identifying engagement and enabling smarter marketing, if this fundamental issue isn’t tackled the value of the platform as a whole will diminish, making it harder to justify the invesment in it. Even for those who are real fans.
Any updates on this? I just put in a support ticket for this as we’re seeing an increase in bot activity that opens and clicks on our emails rendering our emails stats suspect.
Thanks!