Abnormally High CTRs Potentially Caused by Spam Filters – Anyone Else Seeing This?

Emily Loof

I’m seeing a sudden and significant spike in clickthrough rates (CTR) across all of our campaigns, and I’m wondering if others are noticing the same. For example, a recent report shows a CTR of 23% when the campaign averages 1.8%. When I looked closer, I found that many recipients appear to have clicked every link in the email, including my own address, even though I didn’t interact with the message at all. BB Support suggested that this could be caused by spam prevention filters that automatically click all links to verify their safety. These automated clicks are indistinguishable from genuine user engagement, which is artificially inflating our metrics.

While this kind of filtering has always been possible, the scale and sudden onset of the issue seem new. It’s affecting a wide range of domains, not just internal ones, which makes me wonder if a major email service provider (like Outlook or Gmail) recently changed how they handle link scanning—but since no one else is talking about this issue I'm not sure! As far as I can tell, we began experiencing this on or after Sept. 10.

Is anyone else seeing this kind of inflated CTR data? Have you found any reliable ways to filter out or account for these automated clicks? Would love to hear your experiences or any insights you might have. Thanks!

Jeremy Reynolds

I haven't, but Apple just released a new version of their operating system; they've already blown up open rates, wouldn't put it past them to ruin CTRs too.

Will Hull

Here is a link that I found on this topic that might be helpful.

• https://thedigitalmarketingfairy.co.uk/why-are-all-the-links-in-my-emails-being-clicked/

It looks like security software might also be a culprit, like McAfee, Eset, Norton, etc. might be testing the links to ensure that they are safe. There might be other reasons as well (discussed in the article link above).

I hope you find it helpful.