Bot Clicks and Click Through Details Reports

Rachel Goldfarb
Rachel Goldfarb
Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions

Front line fundraisers on my team are interested in click through reports for particular email messages, but the click through details report includes a lot of clicks that I am certain are from spam check bots etc. I can't just hand over this report to the front line fundraisers, because I can't confirm that all of the data is fully accurate to their needs.

Is there any way to get more reliable human click reporting beyond, say, filtering out clicks based on the time stamp vs the send time?

Tagged:

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge

    @Rachel Goldfarb
    From your perspective, you can only filter based on what the clickthrough details report gives you, so unless you can identify from info (i.e. odd email address or huge quantity of clicks in short span of time), you are out of luck.

    I think Blackbaud “may” be able to do something in identifying spam, but you need to open a Blackbaud support case to ask.

    Also, clickthrough reports are only tracking clicks from email you sent out, so are you having situation where within your LO database, there are a lot of fake emails that hit the inbox of spammer?

  • Rachel Goldfarb
    Rachel Goldfarb
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Alex Wong re: your last sentence, it's just that my list is heavy on corporate addresses that have tight security systems (things like Mimecast, etc) that all generate faux-clicks in their spam filters.

  • Erik Leaver
    Erik Leaver Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Rachel Goldfarb Click reporting has become more challenging because of the security devices you mention. You might want to make some groups based on email domain so you can isolate the non-corporate addresses from the largest email service providers (gmail, apple, yahoo, etc). That will help you see the overall trends for a particular email.

  • Will Hull
    Will Hull Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Kudos 1 Participant

    Here is some more information that you might find helpful: https://thedigitalmarketingfairy.co.uk/why-are-all-the-links-in-my-emails-being-clicked/

    Additionally, a good way to see if bots are clicking might be to hide a link with CSS, and if it is clicked, you know that a bot accessed that link.

    e.g. <a href="…" style="display: none;">This is the link</a>

    That might be a way to narrow down if a bot is clicking. Please note that it could be a legitimate click from security software like Norton, McAfee, Eset, etc.

Categories