{"id":191252,"date":"2025-09-11T11:17:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/guides\/how-to-spot-bot-opens-and-clicks-in-email"},"modified":"2025-10-01T11:18:49","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T09:18:49","slug":"how-to-spot-bot-opens-and-clicks-in-email","status":"publish","type":"guides","link":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-gb\/guides\/how-to-spot-bot-opens-and-clicks-in-email","title":{"rendered":"How to spot bot opens and clicks in your email statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How to spot bot opens and clicks in your email statistics<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

After days of tinkering with texts, images, and code, the moment has arrived: your newsletter is ready. You hit send\u2026 within seconds, the email opens, and clicks start rolling in. Brilliant news, you’d think. But looks can be deceiving. Those clicks might not come from readers at all, but from bots.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The percentage of bot opens and clicks<\/a><\/span> in email marketing has increased for several years. We’re facing a growing challenge: How do you spot bot opens and <\/span>clicks and extract genuine human behaviour from your email statistics?<\/p>\n

What are bot clicks (and why do they exist)?<\/h2>\n

Bot clicks are automated link clicks in an email, carried out by software<\/a> rather than by a human recipient. These bots are often part of security systems or spam filters that scan incoming emails for threats.<\/p>\n

When your email lands on the recipient’s mail server, such a system may “click” every link to check for phishing or malware. This happens almost instantly after delivery, sometimes even before the recipient has opened the email.<\/p>\n

Such pre-scans are common in business environments (companies, governments, and education), where security measures are stricter.<\/p>\n

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Disclaimer:<\/h4>\n
This guide describes how to spot bot behaviour in your email statistics, mainly when your email marketing software does not automatically filter out opens and clicks generated by non-human interactions (NHI). Spotler’s email marketing software has built-in filters to identify bot behaviour.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Bot opens and clicks<\/h2>\n

Apart from bot clicks, there are bot opens or proxy opens: emails flagged as “opened” not by the recipient, but by a system or privacy service.<\/p>\n

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection<\/strong> (MPP) is a well-known example<\/span>, introduced in 2021. This feature automatically preloads images (and, therefore, open-tracking pixels). The result? You see an “open” in your stats even if the user never read the message.<\/p>\n

These measures exist to protect users’ privacy and safety, not to annoy marketers. Think of them as airport security checks: every bag (or link) is screened before passengers (or recipients) are cleared. This is reassuring for users but frustrating for marketers who want to measure engagement accurately.<\/p>\n

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Curious to know how your email marketing is performing?<\/strong>
Go to the dashboard<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Why are bot opens and clicks a problem for marketers?<\/h2>\n

It’s one thing that automatic opens and clicks exist. However, it becomes a challenge when we look at traditional email marketing KPIs. Recent research data from the GDMA Email Benchmark 2025 shows that recipients worldwide are still eagerly opening emails (an average unique open rate of 32.5% in 2024, comparable to previous years) but click through less. Worldwide, the Click-to-Open Rate dropped<\/a> to 7.6% and the Click-Through Rate to only 2.9% in 2024.<\/p>\n

Marketers are looking for explanations: is the content less appealing, or are measurement problems playing a role? Probably both. Bot activity can artificially inflate or cloud the performance, meaning that you can no longer determine the effectiveness of your email marketing. A summary of the effects of bot opens and clicks:<\/p>\n

Distorted engagement metrics<\/h3>\n

Your click rate and open rate no longer reflect genuine interest. A click rate that partly consists of ‘fake clicks’ gives a false picture of engagement. With Apple’s MPP, open rates suddenly rose, without more people reading your content. In short, these traditional metrics are less usable as genuine KPIs.<\/p>\n

Misleading A\/B tests and optimisation<\/h3>\n

Making decisions based on unreliable data is dangerous. Suppose you test two subject lines and version A wins on open rate. But what if the proxy distorts those figures? Or you conclude that a specific call-to-action attracted many clicks, while half came from bots. You may then draw the wrong conclusions and make the wrong choices.<\/p>\n

Automation and segmentation are going off track<\/h3>\n

Many email marketers use behavioural rules (‘if contact X clicks on link Y, then\u2026’) for personalised follow-up. Bot clicks throw a spanner in the works: contacts can wrongly move through a funnel or end up in a segment because a bot clicked on a trigger link.<\/p>\n

A recent example on LinkedIn suggested that even a well-known hotel website was suffering from bot opens and clicks. Here, review emails are triggered after a hotel stay and contain a button that leaves a positive review. However, this button has no validation and, therefore, ensures that many ‘hotel guests’ suddenly become enthusiastic about hotels where they might not have slept well.<\/p>\n

Increased difficulty cleaning inactive contacts <\/h3>\n

Typically, you can identify non-active recipients after a particular time based on the absence of opens or clicks and possibly ‘sunset’ them. But if even people who have not opened their mailboxes for 2 years occasionally show a bot click, it becomes difficult to determine who is inactive. Keeping your database clean, therefore, requires more investigation.<\/p>\n

Well. It should be clear: bot clicks and other non-human interactions make reporting more difficult. For years, clicks have been an essential currency in email marketing, but now bots, especially for B2B senders, are increasingly contaminating that statistic.<\/p>\n

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Many marketers have a policy of removing inactive contacts<\/strong> from their email database.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The growth of bot clicks: how big is the problem?<\/h2>\n

Bot opens and clicks are not entirely new, but their impact is increasing. These types of bots have existed for years, but they were less noticeable as long as they only concerned incidental clicks. In 2025, however, we see it occurring more and more often.<\/p>\n

Firstly, virtually every primary mailbox provider (from Gmail’s ‘Click-time link protections<\/a>‘ to Outlook’s ‘Safe Links<\/a>‘) has implemented additional security layers in recent years to protect users. This means that emails are more often scanned automatically.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the email volume has continued to grow. In 2023, an estimated 347 billion emails per day were sent worldwide<\/a>, and with that massive flow, the necessity to filter out harmful emails automatically also increases.<\/p>\n

A third development is that the email industry has become more aware of these developments. In the GDMA International Email Benchmark 2025, an attempt was made to map the proportion of bot opens and clicks. The good news is that several Email Service Providers (ESPs) can distinguish bot clicks from real ones. The bad news is that not every ESP can do this, and as an email marketer, you still need to remain sharp and critical of your email results.<\/p>\n

Finally, we clearly see that business recipients are responsible for many of the bot interactions. For example, with Microsoft\/Outlook domains, an increase in automatically clicked links and even unwanted unsubscribes has been observed.<\/p>\n

B2B marketers report that entire groups of addresses within one organisation suddenly all click on the same link immediately after sending. However, this does not mean that B2C mailers escape the phenomenon; large mail providers such as Gmail and Yahoo also now carry out intensive security checks<\/a> on incoming mail.<\/p>\n

How to recognise bot behaviour<\/h3>\n

Bots behave differently from humans (obviously<\/em>). Some indicators to watch out for:<\/p>\n