Email marketing experts will urge you to follow the latest and greatest best-practices: Personalize your content, send to only engaged audiences, segment whenever possible and create accurate personas, clean up your database, avoid adding contacts from purchased lists, and so on.

All that is well and good if you want to create optimized email campaigns. But what if our metrics are off because of spam bots?

More and more, marketers are calling bull on their email performance stats. From instantaneous click metrics to mismatched data between your CMS and marketing automation software/system/solution (MAS) tool, bots are running wild with email clicks. It's becoming normal to see an email with inflated clickthrough rates that aren't possible based on the open rate.

So how can email marketers combat that problem?

Consider the following highly tactical tips to identify whether you're having this issue, how to catch those damn dirty bots, and what to do once you've found them.

First Things First: Monitor Your Sending Reputation

Let's start off easy. Is your company a reputable sender, or have you entered the alternate universe of spammers and are no longer reaching the inbox of your desired audience? Checking your email domain reputation is a quick way to see whether your emails have the potential to reach people's inboxes, or whether they're getting caught by spam bots from the get-go.

Tools like Barracuda, Sender Score, Talos Intelligence, and others can give you a snapshot of your sender reputation in real-time.

An example from Barracuda is below. Just navigate to the Barracuda site and type in your IP/Domain for an up-to-date reputation summary.

If you're looking for something a bit more in-depth, try Sender Score. The same idea applies: Just enter the IP of the sender you'd like to check and presto, your reputation comes to light. Sender Score is great for providing deeper info on whether your SPF and MX records are still valid and checking your SSL certificate expiration date and your sender scores for specific IPs along with their volume.

Reference Your Web Analytics

The first step to combating a spam bot problem is seeing whether you have one to begin with. One initial step to double-check whether those email performance metrics you're seeing are BS is to reference your Web analytics.

Connect with your website team to view specific stats from Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or other analytics tool for content you sent via email. Now, we all know email performance reports aren't perfect 100% of the time, but if GA is showing click metrics that are off by thousands of clicks, then obviously something is amiss.

What to do next?

Operation: Covert Landing Page

A "covert" landing page, as I like to affectionately call it, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a hidden landing page designed to track bots

A covert landing page can be set up as a dummy program in your MAS tool and added to different emails in an unseen, hidden spot where no real user would ever click on it.

Here I'll use Marketo for my personal example, but the same principles apply to other MAS tools as well.

After setting up the Operational program with a dummy landing page, next you can set up a Smart Campaign to track these covert clicks. Begin in the smart list by using a trigger filter for Clicks Link in Email > Email is any > Link is Covert Page and input your specific landing page link.

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

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Alexa Korach

Alexa Korach is a digital marketing professional specializing in marketing automation, operations, content, and analytics. She lives in Philadelphia, where she works on the demand generation team of a global consulting firm.

LinkedIn: Alexa (Stepien) Korach

Twitter: @AlexaKorach