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Filter non-human activity from your email campaign reports
Filter non-human activity from your email campaign reports

Filter any non-human opens and clicks from your campaign reports.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

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.


Before you start

Things you need to know:

  • You must be an Account owner or Managed user with the Can manage account permission turned on.

  • Non-human activity filtering works on standard and triggered email campaign reports and transactional email reports.

  • The filter won’t affect past activity. Once you turn on the filter, we’ll filter all new opens and clicks across all your email campaigns and transactional email. We won't filter any opens and clicks that occurred before you turned on the filter, regardless of where they came from.

  • Enabling the filter means that opens or clicks identified as non-human activity will not trigger automations.

  • Enabling the filter means unsubscribe link clicks from sources identified as non-human require you to reenter the recipient's email address to complete the unsubscribe. This prevents unsubscribes caused by non-human interaction.


How it works

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 cross-references this with external data, such as Whois, Ripe, DNS data, and internal data, including click behaviour for single accounts and aggregate data across the entire Dotdigital estate. This is done both proactively and when a specific customer flags suspected NHI activity in their reporting to our support team.

If we're confident that the source flagged by the algorithm is a security or anti-spam appliance, Messaging Operations creates a rule in our NHI Watchdog to discard clicks and opens from that source. This new rule is applied to all accounts with NHI filtering switched on.

Security appliances constantly change their approach to combat new threats and keep their users safe. Our augmented intelligence approach gives Dotdigital the flexibility to adapt as they do and endeavour to keep our customers' reporting as accurate as possible. If you see unusual click rates in your reporting that could be non-human interaction, please let our support team know so we can investigate further.

Turn on the non-human activity filter

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings.

  2. Under Features, select the Filter non-human engagements and interactions from email reports check box.

  3. Select SAVE SETTINGS.

Turn off the non-human activity filter

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings.

  2. Under Features, clear the Filter non-human engagements and interactions from email reports check box.

  3. Select SAVE SETTINGS.

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