We’re having a really strange issue that started in the last week, and HubSpot support hasn’t been able to give a definitive answer. Was wondering if anyone else is experiencing this?
Since last week, when we send a marketing email, the engagement starts low, flatlines, then hours later the opens/clicks spike all at once randomly. When the opens/clicks spike, our website floods with traffic and it overwhelms the server. Based on this, it’s not just HubSpot’s reports that are off, but the clicks / opens themselves are real and sending traffic to our site. Additionally, we NEVER used to get this many opens / clicks. Our open rates have doubled and click rates have more than 10x since this has been happening.
Hi @KAndries this is really strange behavior, especially since you have other opens/clicks initially as you would expect. Are you seeing the same thing with adjusted open rates?
I’m going to see if I can recreate this behavior - what was the total list size? It’d be helpful to understand what percentage of contacts are causing the spike.
Here’s the email summary report. I checked the adjusted open rate and it’s roughly the same - 26%. The email was sent to around 7k contacts. The strangest part is that our average open rate for this list is between 10-12%, and the average click rate is less than 3%, so these new metrics + the traffic being sent to our site from this type of email seem way off.
You’re welcome @KAndries this is really interesting, I’m going to see if I can find any other situations like this happening and will let you know what I find.
Hi @KAndries I’ve checked quite a few emails across multiple accounts and couldn’t find any that had a spike like this.
Tagging in a few others to see if they’ve run into anything like this @jolle@trevordjones@elizheleva - have you noticed any spikes in email open rates that happen a few hours after the send? (screenshots/details in thread)
We had similar. I found two lines in when I drilled down that said they were email “snapshot”. But they had 100% bounce, zero time in session, despite being 4x our normal traffic. I thought it might be some sort of bot, but it’s throwing off my email numbers. Got a dead end on figuring out what it is, doesn’t lead to any contact records.
I know you posted this question some time ago, and I wanted to check in to see if you’ve found a solution. If you have, we’d be incredibly grateful if you could share the steps you took – your insights would certainly help others in the community facing a similar challenge! If you’re still looking for a solution, please let us know so we can continue our investigation.
We didn’t find a ‘solution’, but we traced the surge to emails from the mailchimp platform. We don’t use that, we send all of our emails via hubspot. Speculation is that it’s something running in a customer or industry newsletter that links back to our site. But we don’t know who, and could not find any identifiable information about the source newsletter, no understandable parameters, etc.
It’s weird that is shows up in our email marketing, as I don’t think a sponsorship or ad in another third party email would be ‘email marketing’. And we aren’t using any paid email marketing services.
That’s a fascinating and definitely puzzling situation! It sounds like you’ve done some solid detective work, even if the source remains elusive.
It’s certainly weird that Mailchimp-sourced traffic is showing up under “email marketing” in your analytics when you only send emails via HubSpot. Your speculation about it being a link in a customer or industry newsletter makes a lot of sense. Analytics platforms sometimes attribute traffic based on referrer data (where the click came from), and if the link passed through a Mailchimp campaign system, it could be tagged that way, even if you weren’t the sender.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s a good reminder of how complex attribution can sometimes be!
