How does the robot filter for scanner clicks work?
Not every recorded click comes from a reader. Many organisations protect themselves against spam, phishing and malware with advanced security filters that assess all incoming email. For spam, these filters look at the text, the images and technical aspects such as DKIM and SPF. To guard against phishing and malware, an increasing number of filters also follow the links in an email to check what is on the underlying page.
Laposta records this link-following as a click. Because these automated clicks do not belong in your reports or as the starting trigger of an automation, Laposta tries to filter them out of your results.
During a large send-out, all those filters might also visit your website at the same time. You can manage this by sending with a delay. Laposta detects broken links for you before sending.
How Laposta recognises a scanner
Laposta assesses all incoming ‘events’ (such as opens, clicks, subscriptions and unsubscribes) before they appear in the reports. Each event receives a score on various points, including:
- Rapid succession of clicks from the same email address.
- Rapid succession of clicks from the same IP address, whether or not in combination with the ‘user agent’.
- The type of event.
- IP addresses that have been identified as frequently being scanners, or that are known not to be scanners.
The combined final score determines whether it is a human or a computer and whether the event counts towards the results. Because scanners are constantly changing, Laposta updates the filter regularly.
An open can also come from a scanner, because a filter loads the images when assessing your newsletter. To find out how this affects your open rates, read why you see many opens for the same address.
Consequences for automations and segments
If you set an automation to start as soon as someone clicks on a (specific) link, you do not want a scanner to trigger that automation. The same applies to a segment based on a click in a sent campaign: subscribers who have not clicked anything themselves could end up in it.
Laposta tries to recognise scanner clicks as accurately as possible, but cannot guarantee 100% that a click comes from your subscriber themselves. Keep this in mind when you start an automation on a click or segment based on campaign results.
Reporting automated clicks to the helpdesk
Do you still see activity from a scanner or robot under Results, such as many clicks within one or two seconds? You can report this to the helpdesk via helpdesk@laposta.nl, so Laposta can further improve the filter.