How to filter out false clicks in campaign flow

Your software
My Mautic version is: 3.1.1
My PHP version is: 7.3.23

Your problem
My problem is:

I’ve realised when analysing my contacts that there are a lot of false clicks on links being registered by Mautic, probably due to spam filters checking the links are safe. Does the Mautic community have a good way of dealing with this? I thought about adding in a hidden link so if a contact clicks on that, I can tell that other links were most likely clicked by a bot, but I don’t think the Mautic campaign flow has an option for saying don’t do something if a contact clicks on a link? Any ideas/solutions welcomed.

These errors are showing in the log: N/A

Steps I have tried to fix the problem: None yet!

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Anybody got any ideas on this? :smiley:

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There was a post over in the Git that was closed (https://github.com/mautic/mautic/issues/9162) and was suppose to come back here. This would be a great addition I think to have some sort of add on like colourfulowl starts to discuss.

Hi

I have been having the same issue. also, they click the “unsubscribe” link and the one-click unsubscribe removes them. I can see patterns for the same companies - so I guess there is a filtering system in place.

I also use hubspot and I have not run into this issue. they may have a fix for this.

no solution yet.

Are there any thoughts on this yet? Seems to be a big issue on my end. We are moving MQL’s based on a lead score right now. With all of the false positives we are getting now from the firewalls, most of the leads are really not ready to be passed yet.

If you are scoring with campaigns (email opened or link clicked or whatever) I use the device type and use the Unix and Linux as an assumptive false positive for opens and clicks. On the flip side I use Contact device windows, ios, android, chrome os and so on as a presumptive open or click by recipient.

@EJL @hannahhayes Looking at the device sound like a really good idea. Currently, I’ve been looking at the open delay in the reports function and any opens within 30secs of the email being sent are most likley to be bots so was ignoring. I will definitely be looking at the device now as well.

Hi. How do you post in Mautic forums?! Anyone?! I’ve read more than ten posts! Reconsidering Mautic now!

Hey @monkeyjedi - you just posted :-).

If you are asking how do you add a new topic, in the right hand corner of the main screen (I think bottom) you will see a big Plus sign, just click on it and you are ready to go

Thanks. It took a long time for the + sign to start showing. This is a good thread, BTW. I think maybe Cloudflare’s security features are registering one page visit as 7 or 8 visits in Mautic.

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Thanks everyone for the feedback so far. I’ve personally decided to go with including a bait link in my emails for now (a link to our T&C page hidden behind a hyphen that only a bot is likely to click). When they click on the bait link, I automatically tag them as a spam clicker.

Unfortunately this means I might miss clicks from recipients who use spam checkers but still click on the link themselves after the spam check, but by using a points system as well I’ve been able to identify most of the real clicks on important links.

All of these methods only work if you’re sending emails via the campaign route as opposed to a segment email, so I do really hope that Mautic will implement something to sort this automatically in the future because it sounds like there are methods out there.

For gmail addresses I am trying a little experiment. If you see Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy) in the open history then its a false click, as gmail has “scanned” the email content and links. This triggers the tracking pixel and creates a false open.


216.239.34.10
216.239.32.10
216.239.36.10
216.239.38.10

are some IPs I found in raw dns queries. I added them to List of IPs to not track contacts in settings/config. Ill report those results, but I doubt it will be effective.

Im playing with adding a “device” or a “browser” with some sort of regex of via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy So false clicks can be more readily identified and perhaps be addressed in lead score.

Ill report those results as well. Still digging through the code.

I’m looking at records right now. Yahoo people I’m looking at are hitting pages once. Hotmail so far, sometimes one hit, sometimes a few rapid-fire hits. Gmail, lots of hits on a page hit. Me.com, same. Lots of hits.