Click bots inflate email click rates, making it harder to assess real engagement. Click bot protection in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights filters out automated clicks in real-time journeys, providing more accurate reporting..
Marketers face an ongoing challenge to distinguish genuine email clicks from bot activity. With inflated metrics caused by security bots, campaign decisions can become skewed.
In this post, we explore how click bot protection works in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, how to enable it, and why it matters more than ever for accurate marketing performance.
Understanding Bot Activity
In response to ever-increasing security threats, email bot scanning software is now widely used. Your recipients’ organisation may have a server-side scanner to protect against incoming attacks, such as malware or phishing, which will be monitored before they arrive in the recipient’s mailbox. In addition, there might be software installed on the recipient’s mailbox that scans all of the links, too.
These bots will run through a process by identifying each link in your marketing email and opening them to check for potential threats. While providing essential security protection, a drawback of these solutions can be inflated marketing metrics.
Impact of Poor Data Accuracy
The presence of click bots can significantly impact marketing data accuracy. Without effective detection, these bots can artificially inflate click rates in your email analytics, giving you a false impression of campaign performance. This skewed data can lead to misguided decisions and ineffective marketing strategies.
For example, with this misleading data, you could end up wasting time and budget on campaigns that aren’t performing as well as the reports suggest.
Also, bot activity can trigger misleading signals and unexpected outcomes in your customer journeys. For example, a journey that uses ’email clicked’ as a condition for branching may be activated incorrectly due to bot clicks. This could result in customers receiving irrelevant follow-up communications, potentially harming your relationship with them.
To tackle these challenges, robust bot protection is needed. By filtering out this activity, you gain a more accurate view of your campaign performance to make decisions with confidence by recognising actions from genuine human interactions.
Implementing Click Bot Protection
Customer Insights environments installed after July 2024 have this feature enabled automatically.
To check bot protection, follow these simple steps:
- Navigate to the Settings menu
- Look for the Feature switch option
- Locate and enable the Bot Protection toggle
- Click Save.
Once you turn this on, it will filter out suspected bot clicks on emails, text messages, push notifications, and custom channels.
Bot protection only affects future data collection, so historical data remains unaffected.
After activation, you might notice a decrease in click rates across your email and other channel analytics. This drop is actually a positive sign, indicating that bot clicks are being filtered out. As a result, you’ll gain a more reliable view of your analytics data, free from artificial inflation caused by bot activity.
How Does Bot Click Detection Work?
Bot protection in Customer Insights – Journeys uses a sophisticated system to identify and filter out nonhuman interactions. When a link is clicked, the system redirects the click through an intermediate page. On this page, Customer Insights – Journeys performs a series of checks to determine whether the click came from a bot or a human.
These checks involve advanced behavioural analytics and customisable security settings. The system examines various data points, such as typing speed, browsing behaviour, and mouse movements. By comparing these patterns to known human interactions, the system can identify anomalies that suggest automated behaviour.
Bot protection doesn’t impact email or push notification open rates. The system focuses specifically on link clicks, which are more susceptible to bot manipulation.
With bot click protection turned on, we can see a signifcant reduction in clicks created by automated bots.
How Will Click Bot Protection Help?
With accurate data and reliable metrics at their disposal, marketing teams and business leaders can make more informed choices regarding their marketing strategies, customer engagement initiatives, and overall business operations.
Reliable and trusted insights gained from bot-protected data enable organisations to:
- Identify genuine trends in customer behaviour and preferences
- Allocate resources more effectively based on accurate engagement metrics
- Refine targeting strategies to reach the most receptive audience segments
- Optimise email content and timing based on real human interactions
- Make data-driven decisions about campaign improvements and future marketing initiatives
Our Experience With The New Bot Click Protection
Bot click detection is a welcome feature addition. We are already using it and observing the benefits of more accurate reporting. Previously, we would need to manually look at the most suspicious patterns of clicks and strategise how to filter these out, but this action is no longer necessary in most campaigns.
Next Steps
We advise organisations to ensure this feature is enabled and carefully look at campaign performance after making any changes.
You may need to adjust your customer journeys and segments to account for the difference in reporting if these were previously inflated by bot activity.
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