About Bot Activity and Bot Filtering

Bot activity is any non-human interaction with your campaigns. Bot activity is typically caused by antivirus scanning and other automation programs such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). Bot activity can falsely inflate your open and click metrics.

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.
• Mailchimp can tell which emails were opened by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and which were not. You can exclude the open-related metrics impacted by Apple MPP from your reports for emails sent on or after June 22, 2024.

How it works

Bot activity is any non-human interaction with your campaigns. This automated activity usually comes from security services that search for malicious behavior. This could include an email service provider’s anti-spam security, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), and link preview generators. These security tools automatically open campaigns and click links before your contacts have the opportunity to view or open an email.

Bot activity inflates open and click metrics. This includes metrics such as open rates, click rates, total opens, total clicks, and clicks per unique opens. Bot activity creates unreliable data and makes it difficult to make marketing decisions based on these metrics.

Mailchimp’s bot filtering can identify most bot activity and filter the inaccurate data out of your campaign reports. Bot filtering hides bot activity, but it doesn’t remove the data from your account. To see all of your open and click data, turn off bot filtering. To get a more accurate view of your open and click engagement metrics, turn on bot filtering.

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