Erroneous opens being shown recently

[STripathy]

Hey everyone, would be great if someone can help with this. We suddenly saw our open rates shoot up for a specific email. Upon investigaton, we found that majority (>98%) of them had opened in less than 3 seconds with an user agent (Microsoft Edge 12.246)

It's clearly being opened by bots, but not sure why the activity suddenly spiked this month.

These metrics were fine last month, but we are seeing this weird spike now. 

Did anyone else also come across this? Any tips to overcome the fake opens? (apart from bot filtering, since that would just entirely ignore the suspicious base, not adjust it

Would be great if you can share please 🙂 

Thanks in advance,

Soumik

[Grönska]

We have just experienced the same problem. We sent the email at 06:00, and 63% opened it at exactly 06:02 (and all of them seem to open it in Chrome 35 which is weird/might be a clue?). Many of the customers we have talked to afterwards have said they never received the email, others have received it and opened it, but later in the day (and most often on a mobile device). We have the bot-filter turned on, and the adjusted opening rate doesn't give a different picture. So I'm eager to know if there is anything we can do to make the opening rate accurate! 

[DianaGomez]

Hi @Grönska, hope you are doing well! 🙂

Mia provided a great response about this. You can take advantage of the information 🙂

Best,

Diana

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @STripathy,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! 

 Is bot filtering turned on for your account? This should exclude most of the bot opens.

Are you also looking at the adjusted open rate? This metric should give you more accurate data. You can find more information about the adjusted open rate in this Knowledge base article. 

I also wanted to share this Community article where a couple of other Community members reported a similar behaviour. 

I hope this helps!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team