Filtering Out Fake Clicks: Keeping Your Click Rate Clean

Prev Next

Maestra excludes clicks generated by email security scanners from the statistics to ensure your reports reflect real user engagement.

Where Bot Clicks Come From — and How They Skew Your Metrics

Many large organizations use email security scanners — automated systems (bots) that:

  • Automatically open incoming emails;

  • Click on every link in the message;

  • Do this before the recipient even sees the email.

These scanners are designed to protect employees from:

  • Phishing websites;

  • Malicious links and files;

  • Social engineering attacks.

As part of the scan, they “click through” all links and run them through antivirus tools, sandboxes, and firewalls. Based on the scan results, the system decides whether to:

  • Deliver the email to the Inbox;

  • Send it to Spam or Promotions;

  • Or block it entirely.

These automated actions can seriously distort email performance analytics:

  • Opens and clicks are registered before the user actually engages;

  • Clicks may happen in bulk within seconds — and are not real;

  • Automated flows (like sending a follow-up campaign after a click) can be triggered by false events.

This makes it harder to trust your data and personalize communication effectively.

How Maestra solves it

To prevent these issues, Maestra applies Bot Click Filtering System.

How the filtering works

Step 1: Initial filtering

  • All clicks from transactional campaigns, and from users without email scanners enabled, are immediately counted in your click statistics.

  • All other clicks are placed in a temporary queue for up to 10 seconds for further analysis.

Step 2: Behavior analysis

During the 10 seconds wait, Maestra reviews click patterns to decide whether they were likely made by a bot.

A click is automatically discarded as bot activity if it meets any of the following conditions:

  • 4 or more clicks within 1 second

  • 5 or more clicks within 10 seconds

Important:

  • Filtering only applies to clicks and unsubscribe requests.

  • Opens are always recorded, even if the related click is flagged as bot-driven