If you ever want to start a conversation with an email marketer, there are three topics that are guaranteed to spark a lively debate – deliverability, segmentation, and bot clicks. These aren’t just challenges that impact email marketing performance. They are hills that email marketers (figuratively) die on every day.

While enhanced deliverability and list segmentation can be managed under the umbrella of best practice, bot clicks feel very different. Their mere presence feels like an attack on everything many of us email marketers and our clients hold dear. What’s worse, the detection mechanisms we once relied on are no longer enough. Bots have evolved, and your old ESP’s defenses may be struggling to keep up.

So what is a bot click, how do they impact your email marketing strategy, and how can you manage your campaign expectations when you don’t know who to trust? In this article, we’ll reveal all.

What is a Bot Click?

A bot click is an interaction with a link in your email campaigns that is not triggered by a human, but instead by an automated system. These are typically security or filtering tools scanning for malicious content and designed to protect recipients by pre-checking links before the email ever reaches the inbox. While their intentions are good, the side effects for marketers can be more than a little frustrating.

Bot clicks can inflate your engagement metrics, making it appear as though subscribers are interacting with your content when, in reality, nobody has even seen the email. This leads to false positives in your reporting, skewed A/B test results, and unreliable data feeding into your segmentation and automation strategies.

Most Bot Clicks Mean No Harm (But Still Cause Damage)

Unlike spam bots or other malicious actors, these bots are often part of corporate or ISP-level security systems. They don’t mean any harm – in fact, they’re doing their job by scanning links to protect users from phishing and malware. But in doing so, they distort the truth about how your audience is engaging with your campaigns.

The problem is that this distortion can lead to unforeseen consequences. For example, when a bot click is mistaken for genuine engagement, it can trigger an automated journey – sending follow-up emails, unlocking gated content, or even initiating sales outreach based on what is essentially a false signal. Suddenly, your carefully crafted nurture sequence is being wasted on a recipient who hasn’t even opened the email, let alone shown real interest.

This not only wastes resources but also risks damaging your sender reputation and subscriber trust. If a contact receives a follow-up email referencing content they never saw, it can feel intrusive or confusing. Worse still, if your segmentation relies on these false positives, you could be feeding flawed data into your entire marketing ecosystem – from personalization to performance reporting.

Why Bot Clicks Hit B2B Marketers Harder Than B2C

While bot clicks are a nuisance for any email marketer, B2B marketers often feel the impact more acutely than their B2C counterparts. The reason lies in the very nature of the B2B email environment.

In B2B, emails are typically sent to corporate domains, and those domains are often protected by enterprise-grade security systems. Before a human ever opens the email, a bot may have already clicked every link to ensure they’re safe. From a security perspective, it’s a smart move. But from a marketing perspective, it’s a data disaster.

This means that B2B marketers are far more likely to see inflated click-through rates, false engagement signals, and misleading behavioral triggers. A single bot click can activate a lead scoring model, trigger a sales alert, or enroll a contact into a nurture journey – none of which are based on real human interest.

In contrast, B2C marketers often send to personal email addresses (like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook), which are less likely to use aggressive link-scanning bots. While bot clicks still occur in B2C, they tend to be less frequent and less disruptive.

Is There a One-Size-Fits-All Solution to Bot Clicks?

In short: no – and that’s part of the challenge.

Bot clicks are not caused by a single type of bot or scanning tool. They come from a wide range of sources, including corporate firewalls, email security appliances, and ISP-level filters. Each of these systems behaves differently, and their scanning logic can vary based on configuration, region, and even the recipient’s device or email client.

Because of this variability, there’s no universal fix that works across all environments. What blocks or filters bot clicks in one scenario might fail in another. That’s why effective bot detection requires a multi-layered approach.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to eliminate bot clicks entirely – that’s nearly impossible. Instead, it’s about minimizing their impact, filtering them from your reporting, and ensuring your marketing decisions are based on real human engagement.

How ESPs Spot Bot Clicks in Your Data

Spotting bot clicks manually can be challenging, but modern Email Service Providers (ESPs) are increasingly equipped with sophisticated tools to detect and filter out non-human interactions. Here’s how platforms like Upland Adestra approach the problem.

A Layered Approach

Early bot detection algorithms relied on simple signals like bots following every link, or many clicks happening within a couple of seconds. While these techniques are valuable and do still catch some bots, anti-malware vendors have evolved their approach in their battle to protect users from malware to make it harder and harder to identify their traffic. So advanced bot detection systems use a variety of approaches, combining detection mechanisms, statistical analysis and databases of known bot signatures to improve results.

Behavioral Pattern Analysis

ESPs analyze engagement patterns across millions of campaigns. While bot clicks on an individual email can be difficult and sometimes impossible to identify, when aggregating data across many emails it’s possible to identify patterns. These patterns are flagged and filtered out using machine learning models trained on real-world data.

Randomized Link Insertion

To differentiate human clicks from automated ones, some ESPs insert randomized or decoy links into emails that aren’t visible or obviously clickable for humans. Bots often click several links, including the decoys, while humans typically engage with only relevant content. This technique helps gather information and identify bot behavior.

Interstitial Pages

Advanced ESPs like Adestra may use interstitial pages – temporary landing pages that appear between the email link and the final destination. These pages allow sites to gather more information on the user’s browser and run extra checks, allowing the ESP to better identify bots and exclude their activity from reporting.

Bot Signature Databases

Platforms like Adestra leverage third-party databases of known scanning appliances and security tools. When a click matches a known bot signature it’s flagged and excluded from engagement metrics.

Third-Party Data

Because Bot behavior evolves constantly, we employ third-party services to aid in monitoring and adapt detection models, ensuring your campaigns stay protected against emerging threats and scanning techniques. We do this without sharing any of your customers’ PII (Personal Identifiable Information) with them.

Suspect a Bot Click Problem? Here’s What to Do Next

If your email metrics aren’t adding up and you’re seeing clicks without opens, inflated engagement, or journeys triggering prematurely – it’s time to act.

Talk to your ESP. Immediately.

Your Email Service Provider should be your first line of defense. Ask them:

• Do you offer bot click detection?
• Can you help identify suspicious engagement patterns?
• What steps can we take to clean up our reporting?

A Responsive ESP Will:

• Audit your engagement data for bot-like behavior.
• Flag and filter non-human interactions using advanced detection tools.
• Recommend adjustments to your automation and segmentation strategies.
• Offer integration options with third-party bot detection experts if needed.

Don’t wait for flawed data to derail your campaigns. If you suspect a bot click problem, raise the flag – and ask your ESP to help you restore trust in metrics.

Get the latest insights right in your inbox.

Sign-up for our monthly newsletter for the latest email marketing news and best practices. No spam, just actionable insights.