Inflated click rate

[efedorenko]

Feature Request

Hi Ben,

The click rate in my newsletter has been inflated for the last few months. Looking at clicked URLs in reports, it's clear that some of the clicks are automated — top links are pretty consistently the first few in the newsletter, even while they're mostly system links that shouldn't get a lot of clicks. I looked at the Contact Activity report, and top contacts click on every link several times. All of the most active contacts are on large corporate domains where they most definitely have some sort of security scanners.

This makes it really hard to evaluate the true performance of campaigns and complicates relationships with sponsors. Is there any way to detect clicks by scanners and exclude them from human clicks? Some of them have "Python Requests" as a client, or maybe by detecting consecutive clicks.

Would appreciate any insight!

Plugin Version

3.8.1 Lite

[bencroker]

I’ve been seeing similar in recent months. Almost certainly being caused by security scanners. Differentiating between them and human interactions is tricky, without counting false positives or missing false negatives.

Some options I’ve considered are user‑agent detection, timing heuristics, and JavaScript. I don’t love any of them.