This notice is related to the quality of the metrics you are getting through your Marketing Automation Platform (such as ClickDimensions, Dynamics 365 for Marketing or other similar products).

What’s Happening?

C5 Insight has recently learned that some organizations (generally larger organizations) are using bots to pre-screen incoming emails by clicking on all links prior to allowing users to have access to them. This appears to be resulting in a boost in the total clicks that emails appear to be getting – these additional clicks can be considered to be “false positives” because they are not a human that is clicking.

What Can be Done Now?

There is no immediate remedy to this issue. You can size the problem as it relates to your organization in a couple of ways:

• If your emails seem to have had a sudden boost in the number of clicks, it is likely due to this. You may wish to discount your total click statistics based on this. Unfortunately, there is not a scientific way to adjust your numbers yet.
• This problem seems to mostly be related to large organizational email accounts that are deploying advanced threat and spam detection processes. The more your marketing efforts focus on large organizations, the more this issue will likely impact you.

What’s the Long-Term Plan?

C5 Insight has brought this issue up with Marketing Automation Platform providers and we assume they are working on it internally (we do not have validation, but because this directly impacts their platforms, it is reasonable to expect that they are highly motivated to develop a solution).