Quick Summary
Turning on the “Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Email” setting ensures only genuine subscriber clicks count toward your reports.
This improves the accuracy of your metrics, prevents automation misfires, and supports better decisions across your email strategy.
TargetBay Email & SMS helps you keep reports honest by filtering out email bot clicks from security scanners and spam filters.
The setting affects click tracking only, and while detection is sophisticated, no filter is perfect, so TargetBay Email & SMS continuously updates its logic to stay ahead.
Marketers know the thrill of opening a campaign report to see a sudden spike in click-through rate.
But the excitement fades when you realize those clicks weren’t real people at all. Corporate email security systems often pre-scan links for safety, creating a mirage of engagement that can derail your optimization strategy.
If you’ve ever launched a campaign and watched dozens of near-instant clicks from the same domain, you’ve likely been hit by email bot clicks.
What Are Email Bot Clicks?
Email bot clicks are automated link interactions performed by security gateways, spam filters, or anti-virus systems.
These systems scan every link in an email to detect malicious content before the message is delivered to the inbox. The behavior is protective for recipients but problematic for marketers because it creates activity that looks like engagement when it isn’t.
You’ll typically see bot activity as rapid, clustered clicks hitting multiple links within seconds of delivery, often from similar network ranges or atypical user agents.
None of that behavior reflects someone reading your message, considering your offer, and clicking with intent. Without filtering, the result is inflated click metrics and misleading performance insights.
In short, email bot clicks are a data quality problem. They can trigger workflows, distort A/B test outcomes, and make it harder to separate a compelling creative from a false positive generated by automated scanners.
Why Excluding Bot Clicks Matters for Ecommerce Performance
Getting clicks is only valuable when they represent buyer intent. If your reporting is padded with email bot clicks, your performance decisions rest on sand. For ecommerce teams balancing acquisition costs, conversion goals, and retention targets, that’s a risk worth eliminating.
Protect the integrity of your click-through rate
Click-through rate is a cornerstone metric for measuring relevancy, offer strength, and list quality. When bot clicks slip in, CTR trends get noisy. A seemingly high click rate may mask low human engagement, and a stable CTR might hide a negative shift in audience interest. Turning on bot filtering restores the signal so you can trust what “good” looks like.
Prevent false automation triggers
Click-based automations are powerful because they respond to real intent. If a scanner clicks your “Shop New Arrivals” link and sets off a product follow-up flow, you could flood non-engaged subscribers with irrelevant messages. That frustrates recipients, inflates send volumes, and undermines deliverability. Excluding email bot clicks helps ensure automations fire only when subscribers actually engage.
Make smarter, data-driven decisions
Campaign-level insights guide everything from creative choices to promotional calendars. When you know clicks are human, you can evaluate which subject lines, content blocks, and offers resonate with confidence. That leads to better A/B tests, clearer cohort analysis, and more meaningful benchmarks across seasons and segments.
Keep reporting consistent across your lifecycle programs
Ecommerce brands orchestrate journeys that cross campaigns, triggered flows, and transactional messages. Clean click data gives you a consistent measurement foundation. Within TargetBay Email & SMS, contact engagement, segment movement, and lifecycle progression all benefit when you cut out the noise caused by email bot clicks.
How TargetBay Email & SMS Filters Email Bot Clicks
TargetBay Email & SMS enhances the accuracy of your campaign performance reports by filtering interactions that originate from security scanners and email protection systems.
The platform detects and discards known automated behavior patterns so only genuine subscriber clicks are counted in your “Clicked Email” metrics.
The detection methods include signals commonly associated with automated link scanning.
While no solution can guarantee a 100 percent catch rate, TargetBay Email & SMS continuously refines its filtering logic to adapt to evolving scanning behaviors and new gateway techniques. That means your reporting gets more reliable over time, not less.
Most importantly, the filtering is designed to protect your insights without compromising campaign delivery or subscriber experience.
The process is invisible to recipients and straightforward for your team to enable.
Step-by-Step: Enable Bot Click Filtering in TargetBay Email & SMS
You can activate bot filtering in just a few clicks. The changes apply account-wide to campaign reporting and reduce the odds of misleading activity across your programs.
Start by signing in to your TargetBay Email & SMS account and navigating to the Settings page. You’ll find the controls you need under Campaign Settings, which centralize key options for how your email performance is measured and displayed.
Once in Campaign Settings, scroll to the section labeled Tracking and Reporting Data. This area controls how TargetBay Email & SMS captures and interprets engagement events. You’ll see a checkbox labeled “Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Email.” Check this box to turn on filtering for automated link interactions.
After making your selection, click Save to apply the changes. From this point forward, TargetBay Email & SMS will filter out email bot clicks from your click metrics, helping you analyze genuine subscriber behavior with greater confidence.
What to Keep in Mind
The “Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Email” setting affects click tracking only. Your open rate tracking and other metrics are not modified by this control.
That focus is intentional: most automation misfires and misleading engagement patterns originate with automatic link scanning rather than opens.
While TargetBay Email & SMS uses sophisticated and continually updated detection methods, some bots may still slip through. Security vendors evolve their techniques, and new scanning patterns emerge.
The platform’s ongoing updates are designed to keep pace and improve accuracy, but expecting perfect removal isn’t realistic. The goal is to dramatically reduce inflated clicks and remove the most common sources of false positives.
If you leave the option disabled, your reported click metrics may contain bot activity. That can inflate results, fire automations at the wrong time, and lead to decisions that don’t translate into revenue.
For teams running seasonal promotions, product launches, or post-purchase flows, the difference between clean and contaminated data shows up in both customer experience and bottom-line outcomes.
How Cleaner Click Data Changes Your Day-to-Day
Turning on bot filtering is more than a settings tweak; it changes the quality of every decision you make with your email program.
When you analyze a campaign and see that a specific product category drives the most clicks, you can act on that insight with confidence. When an automation branch depends on a link click, you can trust that the behavior originated from a human subscriber.
This clarity also improves collaboration. Merchandisers can align inventory with true demand signals, creative teams can refine messages based on authentic behavior, and marketing leaders can forecast with less risk of overestimating performance. In a competitive ecommerce environment, that alignment compounds over time.
Evaluating Your Metrics After Enabling Filtering
Once you enable the setting, expect a visible but healthy adjustment in your click numbers.
Dramatic drops often indicate previously inflated reports rather than a real decline in engagement.
The best way to interpret the change is to normalize your benchmarks going forward and compare like-for-like performance under the new, cleaner standard.
You may also notice more stable click-to-open ratios and fewer anomalous spikes within minutes of send time. Flatter, steadier graphs can feel less exciting at first glance, but they are far more actionable.
With email bot clicks filtered out, trends reflect human behavior more closely, making it easier to spot genuinely strong messages and promotions.
The Impact on Automations and Journeys
Click-driven automations are especially sensitive to bot activity. By filtering out automated interactions, TargetBay Email & SMS helps ensure that interest-based flows, browse or product engagement sequences, and intent signals are driven by real people.
That means better timing, more relevant messages, and reduced fatigue from unnecessary follow-ups.
If you’ve been wary of building click-triggered journeys because of false positives, this setting gives you the confidence to lean in.
Use click intent to tailor messages around categories, education, or offers that reflect how subscribers actually engage with your brand.
A Clean Baseline Across Your TargetBay Stack
Brands using TargetBay’s ecosystem benefit from a common source of truth. When TargetBay Email & SMS keeps email click data clean, it complements onsite social proof from TargetBay Reviews and the re-engagement power of TargetBay Rewards.
Reviews provide conversions with credible validation, Rewards nurtures loyalty through incentives, and Email & SMS orchestrates the lifecycle around authentic engagement.
With inflated clicks out of the picture, your entire stack functions with greater precision.
This alignment matters when you’re connecting campaigns with post-purchase requests for photo and video reviews, or segmenting loyalists for early access drops.
Clean click data ensures only the right subscribers enter these experiences, keeping costs down and conversion quality up.
Quick Troubleshooting Notes
If you turn on filtering and later observe anomalies, double-check your automations and reporting windows.
Some historical reports will still reflect prior data, and automations may take a cycle to stabilize.
It’s wise to annotate the date you enabled the setting so your team understands the shift in benchmarks.
Also, remember that filtering does not change open rate tracking. If you’re evaluating subject line tests or send time performance, use the new click data as a companion signal rather than a replacement.
The combination of opens and human-validated clicks paints the clearest picture of message effectiveness.
The Bottom Line for Ecommerce Marketers
Marketing teams have enough variables to manage without inflated metrics distorting the view.
Filtering email bot clicks with TargetBay Email & SMS preserves the integrity of your data, prevents automation misfires, and puts your optimization efforts on firmer ground.
By enabling “Exclude bot interactions from Clicked Email,” you shift from vanity numbers to insights that actually help you sell.
As you scale campaigns, build journeys, and connect post-purchase experiences, clean engagement data becomes a competitive advantage.
With TargetBay Email & SMS powering accurate reporting, and complementary tools like TargetBay Reviews and TargetBay Rewards reinforcing trust and loyalty, your e-commerce brand can execute with clarity from first click to repeat purchase.
