False Reporting of Email Opens and Clicks for Some Contact Email Domains

[Jeck87]

Hi Community,

I'm hoping someone can help me out and explain why this is happening.  I've been sending out sales emails via HS sequences that contain links to click as a the call to action.

When I monitor the activity feed after sending messages out I notice that for some email domains, all contacts for that domain will show the email being sent, opened, and clicked at the same time.  And sometimes it doesn't record an "open"

I call these false positives for the CTA and it's really messing up my reporting on the success of email campaigns.  As far as I can tell, the only way for me to determine what was a legitimate click versus a false positive click (like above) is for me to review all of the contacts who clicked... that's not what I call "marketing automation".

Is anyone else experiencing this?  Any workarounds to help address?

Thanks in advance!

[InventAnalytics]

I would love to know if this is being fixed soon because it's hard to rely on results when clicks goin from low double digits to high triple digits and the recipients remain the same.

[RPrivett5]

@Jeck87 did you ever find a solution to this? We are also seeing a lot of false postiives on clicks and open rates. Makes it very hard to get accurate measurements and statistics. We are aware that the issue was likely being caused by a security software/filter. We were curious if HubSpot had any solutions, reports, etc., that would allow us to filter out the automatic clicks and opens on the HubSpot platform so we could have a better estimate on our open and click rates (instead of the inflated numbers that it currently reports)?

[WYork · Accepted solution]

I had this happening on emails as well @Jeck87 . For a short term fix we simply removed those email addresses but it is frustrating that the email stats are not reliable at this momemnt. Also receiving a lot of 'Ghost clicks' where our schedule a meeting link is being clicked the second the email goes out, with very little conversions actually happening. 

[JustinPerkinsC]

The biggest problem we are up against for these stats is that a lot of back-end scanners will pre-click and open emails prior to them getting into an inbox. Will see some folks that show a click on every single URL on an email. 

Not to mention the opening of your own tracked email also causes it to count as an open (totally done this way to often to myself).

[Jeck87]

Thanks for your response Justin.  Glad I'm not the only one seeing this.  @hubspot - are you working on a solution to this?  Without a solution all the dashboarding and metrics around email sequence results are not helpful.  I'd say I see this happening from about 3-5% of the email domains I send messages to.