Has anyone been able to come up with an all encompassing way, through either a list or a workflow, to even identify the folks and/or companies this consistently happens with? Something to the extent of if every link in Email A is clicked flagged this contact engagement as potential bot activity?
The only way I can see to do that at the moment would be to take every single email and say if opened and clicked on this AND this AND this… which obviously is not feasible to do for dozens of emails.
Curious if there is a better way or even a condition that could be added by Hubspot in the list builder to say if All Links clicked in Email or if Links clicked at the same time email was sent…
Would love to hear if anyone has come up with a creative workaround!
Thanks
Hi @MMunroe , not something I’ve implemented myself but saw this and think it mught work: 6 Ways to Handle Spambot Clicks in Marketing Emails - Sponge
It’s for marketo but can’t see why adding a hidden link to catch bot emails engagement and using a workflow to update a checkbox wouldn’t work in HubSpot. You’d then need to use a smart list to find the ‘true’ engagement for each email. Sadly any of HubSpot’s out the box reporting like Email Health would still be useless
We’ve been noticing issues with HubSpot tracking for a while now and when I submit a support ticket I just get the run around with no answers or solutions. Wasn’t until today that I was finally told about the bot activity issues. But with us it’s not just affecting our marketing emails, it’s also an issue with one-to-one sales emails and landing pages. We’re getting false notifications for email opens, clicks, page visits, and form submissions.
Anyone else having the same issues when using pretty much any tool within HubSpot Marketing? I’m having a hard time justifying user costs given the data and analytics is a complete joke.
Bot filtering setting is not helping.
Another data point is corporate email servers will open the same email for all its recipients at the same time. For example, if you send to 3 people at the same domain, we see all 3 people open the email in the same minute. It may be well after HubSpot sent the email…but the opens and clicks are all done at once.
From my understanding, HubSpot groups Bot activity into Account and Behavioral-based activity. HubSpot is aware of Accounts where Bot activity is prevalent and behaviors where the timestamp of the email and the corresponding bot activity happen at nearly the same time. My interest is in the latter and we are hopeful that this type of behavior can be removed from our email results.
This seems to have gotten worse. And it’s easy for me to see bot activity, so I’m not sure why it’s so hard for Hubspot to resolve the majority of these. If an email is sent, then opend and all links clicked in the same minute, it’s clearly a bot. Espacilly if his behavior repeats for all contacts at a company.
While Hubspot does not show down to the second, I bet we would see opens and clicks happening within a few seconds. Also clearly bot activity that should be easy to filter out.
At this point I’d like to see more libral enforcemnt of scrubbing bot clicks and missing some real activity than being consrvative and having SOOO many clearly bot activty mess up all my metrics. Eepecially open-to-click rate, which, due to bots sometimes shows in the 80% range, but is completly bogus.
Do better Hubspot. Pardot and others have…
Jake, please move this one back to ‘Unsolved’. It’s definitely still an active unresolved issue.
Here’s a really reliable methodology to identify domains using security software that actively and routinely clicks links:
- Any domain that (in a single email):
- Gets more than 1 click
- And whose CTR is higher than 50%
- Bonus points if you see that all of the clicks from the domain come within a few minutes of each other.
Please give us the option to filter out this activity. This week my email clicks were inflated to 3x reality because of this. I’ve just stopped emailing people who work for companies with this type of security parameter. But this week 3 new ones started doing it.
Another data point to consider is that email servers will open the same email for all its recipients at the same time. For example, I was facing some issues with my websites blog.
The marketing email filtering is “OK” but what about segments? There doesn’t appear to be anyway to filter these actions in segments, why is this still an issue?