What If Your Email Metrics Are Off: Who's Really Clicking on Your Emails?

Email marketing experts suggest following best practices to create optimized email campaigns. But what if our metrics are off due to spam bots? Marketers are questioning the accuracy of their email performance stats. To combat this problem, marketers can monitor their sending reputation, reference website analytics and use covert landing pages, custom UTMs and smart lists.

Tools like Barracuda, Sender Score, Talos Intelligence and others can be used to check a company's sender reputation. The use of hidden links with specific UTMs can also be used to track bots. Smart lists can be used to identify clicks on covert links and to differentiate between real and fake contacts.

After identifying the bots, marketers can blacklist or suspend them from further communications to prevent inflated email performance reports. This process is time-consuming but necessary to ensure accuracy in email performance.