About Bot Activity and Bot Filtering

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Bot activity includes any non-human interactions with your campaigns, such as antivirus scans, which can falsely inflate open and click metrics. Mailchimp's bot filtering identifies this activity to provide a more accurate view of engagement in your campaign reports.

In this article, you'll learn about bot activity, how it can affect your open and click metrics, and how to filter bot activity out of your campaign reports.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

  • Your open and click metrics will drop significantly when you turn bot filtering on. This is expected and indicates that you’re viewing more accurate data with bot filtering on.
  • In addition to opens and clicks, we recommend that you use additional metrics such as bounces, unsubscribes, and conversions to measure the performance of your emails.
  • Your bot filtering settings will reflect in all reporting across your account. You can’t change bot filtering settings for individual reports.

  • Bot filtered data is available for past reporting metrics starting with these dates.

  • July 10, 2024: Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) opens

  • July 10, 2024: SMS clicks
  • August 10, 2025: Email clicks

How it works

Bot activity is any non-human interaction with your campaigns, usually originating from automated security services searching for malicious behavior. This includes anti-spam security from email providers, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), and link preview generators. These tools often click links or open emails before your contacts do.

Bot activity creates unreliable data and makes it difficult to make marketing decisions based on these metrics. Bot activity inflates metrics such as:

  • Open and click rates
  • Total opens and total clicks
  • Clicks per unique open

Bot filtering identifies most bot activity and hides inaccurate data from your reports without removing it from your account. Turn bot filtering on or off at anytime. To see all data, turn bot filtering off; to see more accurate engagement, turn it on.

Change bot filtering settings

Bot filtering is enabled by default. To change your bot filtering settings, follow these steps.

  1. Click Analytics.
  2. Click Analytics settings or click Bot filtering on.
  3. In the Bot activity section, use the toggles to turn filtering on or off.

Next steps

To learn more about open and click tracking, check out these articles.

About Open and Click Rates Use Open Tracking in Emails Use Click Tracking in Emails Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) FAQs

Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) FAQs

In this article, you'll get answers to common questions about Apple's privacy protection (Apple MPP). Apple MPP impacts your opens and open-related metrics.

About Open and Click Rates

Mailchimp's reports include open and click rates. These rates help you track audience engagement. Use them to learn what subject lines and content perform well.