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Understand bot filtering in marketing email analytics

Last updated: March 8, 2023

Applies to:

All products and plans

When bot filtering is turned on, HubSpot excludes suspected bot activity from your email performance data. This helps provide a more reliable view of human interaction with your emails so you can better measure the success of your email campaigns.

How bot activity is identified and excluded

For email, bot activity includes triggers initiated from privacy filters such as Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and corporate screeners such as Mimecast. HubSpot automatically detects whether email activity was triggered by a human action or not, using IP filtering and other detection algorithms.

By default, bot filtering will be turned on in your account. When this setting is on, HubSpot will filter out suspected bot activity to help you gauge organic engagement with your marketing emails.

Review the impact of bot filtering for your email analytics

After you've sent a marketing email and your recipients engage with your content, you can review metrics like the email's open rate and click rate on the email performance page:

  • In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Email.
  • Click the name of a sent email.
  • In the top right of the page, you can confirm the status of the bot filtering setting by checking the Bot filtering label. If bot filtering is turned on, the email's primary Open and Click rates will exclude bot activity and will only include the estimated percentage of opens made by humans.

bot-filtering-status

Learn more about how to bot filtering on or off. You can also learn more about Mail Privacy Protection on HubSpot's Marketing Blog.

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