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The Reason Why Your Click-Thru Rates Are Randomly Jumping

Last updated: July 17, 2023

Reviewing your email performance metrics is an important part of your promotion plan, especially for determining the effectiveness of changes you made to your overall email strategy. Randomly inflated open and click counts can be extremely frustrating to encounter. Further, determining which counts are legitimate and which are false can be confusing to understand and parse out. Do you typically experience click-thru rates on third-party sends of around 1-2% and then randomly get an email that shows a 15% percent click-thru rate?

While we would hope that every count is a good, quality sales leads for your advertiser, this is most likely the result of website security products clicking on links in your emails to verify the authenticity of the URL before they deliver the email to the end recipient. These inflated click rates can be very bothersome when you review the Tracking Links Clicked section of your Deployment Delivery report.  Many times, they can be isolated to just the first URL in the email.  However, there are times when there are inflated clicks on every single link.

Omeda has always had a process of negating these types of clicks based on algorithms such as “more than X clicks within X seconds” or “two clicks within milliseconds”. As website security technology has evolved and the ability for these products to stop the spammers increased, their ‘secret sauce’ has continuously become more complex. Identifying all of the false clicks can be difficult, but doing so is important in order to review email promotions accurately without removing valid opens and clicks in the process.

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This is where Stealth Link comes into play. A stealth link is a hidden link in your html code that is visible for the security products but a human won’t see it.  If we get clicks on the stealth link, we know they were not executed by any email recipients. By using this information, we are then able to negate all of the clicks from those customers that have clicks on the stealth link since we know they are false. Your Deployment Delivery Report will not report any of the false clicks from security products. Removing the invalid clicks will then ensure that you have quality sales lead clicks to pass along to your advertiser.

Information and instructions for adding a stealth link can be found in our Knowledge Base. Please reach out to emailsuccess@omeda.com with any questions.

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

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