Marketers depend on accuracy when gaining meaningful insights from email campaigns. Click bots are a vital security tool used by organisations to detect spam and cyber security threats. However, they pose a significant challenge to marketing teams, potentially skewing data and undermining the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
Reliable reporting is critical to understanding which recipients are most engaged and qualifying leads for Sales teams. To tackle the problem, implementing robust bot protection has become important for organisations looking to enhance their insights and make data-driven decisions.
In a recent update from the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has found a solution to this problem. As click bot protection is only available in real-time journeys, organisations have further cause to prioritise their transition from Outbound Marketing. This new feature provides improved accuracy by detecting when email clients automatically click your email links. We’ll examine how this works and how it enhances campaign performance reporting.
Understanding Bot Activity
Email bot scanning software can be implemented in different places. The recipient’s 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.
In any case, the bot will run through a process by identifying all of the links in your email and opening them. It does this to run a checklist of potential threats to the client. A drawback of IT implementing these systems is inflated marketing metrics.
Impact of poor data accuracy
The presence of click bots can significantly impact marketing data accuracy. Without bot click detection, these bots can artificially inflate click rates in your email analytics, giving you a false impression of campaign performance. This can lead to misguided decisions and ineffective marketing strategies.
For example, you could waste resources by investing time and money into campaigns that aren’t actually performing as well as they appear. This can lead to inefficient use of marketing budgets and missed opportunities for genuine customer engagement.
Moreover, 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 can result in customers receiving irrelevant follow-up communications, potentially harming your relationship with them.
To tackle these challenges, you need to implement robust bot protection measures. By filtering out bot activity, you can gain a more accurate view of their campaign performance and make data-driven decisions with confidence. This improves the effectiveness of marketing efforts and enhances the overall customer experience by ensuring that communications are based on genuine human interactions.
Implementing Click Bot Protection
Implementing click bot protection is crucial to enhance the accuracy of your Dynamics 365 insights and protect your email marketing campaigns. This section explores how to enable this feature, understand its inner workings, and follow best practices for configuration.
Enabling the Click Bot Protection feature
To enable bot protection in Customer Insights – Journeys, 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 on this feature, it starts filtering out suspected bot clicks on emails, text messages, push notifications, and custom channels. It’s important to note that enabling bot protection only affects future data collection. Historical data remains unchanged, ensuring consistency in your previous analytics. Customer Insights applications installed after July 2024 will have this feature enabled automatically.
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 nonhuman link clicks are being successfully 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 bot click detection works
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.
It’s worth noting that bot protection doesn’t impact email or push notification open rates. This is because the system focuses specifically on link clicks, which are more susceptible to bot manipulation.
How will Click Bot Protection help?
Click bot protection improves decision-making capabilities. 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.
The trustworthy 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
By basing decisions on reliable data, businesses can avoid wasting resources on ineffective strategies or misguided assumptions. This leads to more efficient use of marketing budgets and improved return on investment for email marketing campaigns.
The enhanced insights gained through bot protection allow organisations to create more personalised and relevant customer experiences. By understanding genuine customer interactions, businesses can tailor their communications, offers, and services to meet the actual needs and preferences of their audience. This level of personalisation can significantly improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving business growth.
ServerSys experience with the new Bot Click Protection
Bot click detection is a welcome feature to Customer Insights. At ServerSys, we’re 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.
We like that it’s easy to switch on and are interested in seeing if there will be any future updates. This could include opens as well as clicks. Additionally, it would be useful to control the sensitivity of bot click protection, but nonetheless, this is a welcome improvement.
Next steps
We advise organisations to turn this feature on and look closely at campaign performance for changes. You may need to adjust your customer journeys and segments to account for the difference in reporting. For example, you may need to reduce the number of clicks required for creating a lead. If you need any advice on that action, please get in touch with us.
