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Gainsight Inc.

Bot Detection in Email Engagement Analytics

This article provides Customer Success Managers, and Admins with an overview of bot detection and filtering techniques that improve email engagement accuracy and deliver reliable analytics.

This article provides Customer Success Managers, and Admins with an overview of bot detection and filtering techniques that improve email engagement accuracy and deliver reliable analytics.

Overview

Many automated bots generate false open and click events on emails. This skews engagement metrics and leads to inaccurate reporting, affecting decision-making.

To improve the accuracy of email engagement tracking, Gainsight identifies and filters out false open and click events caused by automated bots. This ensures that email analytics reflect genuine user interactions, leading to reliable reporting and better decision-making.

Key Benefits 

  • Identification and filtering of bot-triggered open and click events to ensure accurate reporting.
  • Reflection of true human engagement in analytics.
  • Provision of  reliable insights for campaign performance and decision-making.

Note: Users may observe a decrease in Email open and click analytics as bot activity is excluded and only genuine user engagement is captured. This applies to emails sent using Journey Orchestrator Programs, Cockpit, and People 360.

Key Features

Gainsight ensures accurate engagement metrics by detecting and filtering bot-generated email clicks and opens with the following key features:

Dashboard displaying email metrics including programs, contacts, total emails delivered, open CTAs, open and click rate, bounce and unsubscribe rate."

  • Invisible links embedded in emails detect and log bot interactions to filter out automated activity.
  • When a bot clicks one of these invisible links, the activity is logged and the bot's IP address is identified.
  • The identified bot IP addresses are now persisted in Gainsight's system. Future email events originating from these IP addresses are automatically ignored, ensuring that bot clicks do not skew engagement metrics or trigger unintended actions.
  • Gainsight monitors the time gap between mail open & send event or click & send event. If the gap falls below a specific threshold, it is deemed as bot-triggered activity and excluded from engagement metrics.
  • User-agent strings are evaluated from email click data. Bots often have unique user-agent identifiers that differentiate them from real human activity. Common bot user-agent strings include Googlebot, Mozilla/5.0, and Barracuda/6.6.5.

By implementing these measures, Gainsight ensures that bot activity does not interfere with your email engagement metrics.

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