Your contacts may use security products to keep their inboxes secure. While this level of security is a good thing, these security products can open your email campaigns and interact with the links they contain. Every time this happens, it can falsely boost your engagement and interaction rates, leaving you unaware of the accuracy of your reports.

To help improve the accuracy of your reports, you can make your account filter out any activity from known non-humans. This filter makes your reports more reliable, but you might see fewer opens and clicks than you're used to.

Things you need to know:

Dotdigital's proprietary non-human interaction (NHI) filter is a collaboration between our brilliant data scientists and our expert Messaging Operations team.

A complex machine algorithm analyses campaign click metrics to look for a variety of indicators of non-human interaction. These indicators distinguish genuine human behaviour from suspected machine behaviour and provide a dataset of potential sources of automated clicks.

The Messaging Operations team proactively investigates suspected non-human interaction (NHI) activity by cross-referencing external data sources, such as Whois, RIPE, and DNS records, with internal behavioural data. This includes both individual account-level link activity and aggregated trends across the Dotdigital platform.

These checks are triggered in two ways: proactively by the team, and reactively when a customer reports suspicious activity to Support. This process is especially important for B2B campaigns, where corporate email security systems often scan and click every link in incoming emails. These automated interactions can significantly inflate engagement metrics, making it harder to assess genuine user behaviour.

If the algorithm flags a source and the Messaging Operations team confirms it’s a security or anti-spam appliance, they create a rule in the NHI Watchdog to exclude clicks and opens from that source. This rule is automatically applied to all accounts with NHI filtering enabled.

The NHI Watchdog uses IP-based filtering to identify these sources and add them to a restricted list. This helps prevent automated interactions from skewing engagement metrics and ensures more accurate reporting.

Security appliances constantly evolve to protect users from emerging threats. Dotdigital’s augmented intelligence approach allows us to adapt to these changes and maintain accurate reporting for our customers.

If you notice unusually high click rates in your reports that may be caused by non-human interaction, contact our Support team so we can investigate.

While the system is designed to detect and filter out automated interactions, it cannot prevent all non-human activity. New security system IPs may occasionally bypass filters until they are identified and added to the restricted list.