hey everyone, i'm not sure if this is still an often-visited thread, but I found it just last week after realizing our 'engagement - clicks and opens' analytics are garbage because of bots. I read this thread, tallked to hubspot support multiple times (they are great, no disrespect, but this is a gnarly problem) and I haven't gotten a response from Hubspot support as to how to filter out bots, not their fault, it's not an easy problem to solve. We did implement and invisible image and labeled the URL as ".../honeypot." If a bot intercepts the email it always click on this link. That's been helpful to determine which companies are using bots. We also created a workflow that looks at the email click/open activity time stamps because we realize bots have predictable behavior in that the timestamps for delivered/open/click1,2,3,4 (however many buttons and hyperlinks you have regardless of whether they are HTML or plan text, including the honeypot) activities are all within the same minute of 'delivered' or all within 2 minutes max.
We created a workflow to create an active list of any recipients who have opens or clicks one day or longer after.
We are using this as our actual 'engagement' metrics and these are the people who get the next touch in the workflow for "engaged." It's a much smaller number of recipients than the clicks/opens that show up in the hubspot performance report, but it's at least more trustable/true/accurate. At least I hope it is. We are just starting to implement it with sends going out today. I'm curious what anyone thinks about this method and if you guys see any 'gotchas' - one I have is that since the start recording date for the workflow trigger is one day after the send we are missing people who engage later that same day, but we can't bring in the start time any closer to the send time and date than the next day. Open to any ideas, especially if you see a hitch in this method.
Mia this is very helpful, thank you. I'm really hoping to hear back from some power users and subject matter experts for their input. I got the first bit of ideas from the community thread and that advice was excellent on a few fronts - detection of the bot activity and also bot behavior to look for. Thanks again!