Hi folks,
From time to time, I’ll see it recorded that someone clicked a link in a marketing email that directs them to our website, but then there is no corrisponding session in web analytics property (Time of Last Session is still weeks earlier)
Why would that happen?
Thanks!
Hi @nychd,
My guess would be that they simply did not accept cookies in their browser or have privacy extensions running that block cookies entirely. When that’s the case, you can assume through the link click that there was web activity but it cannot be tracked.
Best regards!
Adding on to Karsten’s response. In addition to the reasons he listed, I have also found this seems to happen sometimes when there are security clicks on emails. If the email provider checks the link, it can sometimes be recorded as a click but the page visit is not always associated.
That’s my guess at what it is since they are emails based.
Never heard the term “security clicks” before.
“Security clicks” is probably a term my colleagues and I came up with.
We have noticed a lot of clicks on email the minute after an email is sent. We refer to them as bot or security system clicks. It seems to us that the security systems are crawling the email for links and making sure they are safe URLs.
In some more secuitry foucsed audiences (Healthcare/governemnt) we have seen this happen more commonly.
Hubspot trys to filter them out. Does a pretty good job based on how much lower our clicks and opens got after switching to it, but it’s not perfect.
Surprised it doesn’t use click with no session as a way to determine that its a bot.