Bot or not: Measuring email metrics in a bot-inflated world

Measuring email opens after iOS 15 has been a challenge, and there are more challenges ahead as email clicks are rapidly inflated by email security bots. Although email remains a valuable channel in any media mix, reporting tools and attribution models must adapt to inflated email numbers. We dive deep into how our measurement team is navigating this new and changing world of inflated email numbers to deliver accurate reporting and actionable insights to clients.

Rise of email bots

The famous John Wanamaker quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” still applies. With his decidedly nondigital ads, Wanamaker didn’t know which ads led to which conversions. But, at the very least, he could be sure he was reaching only real people with his ads. Today we can track every impression, click, and interaction with our ads, but Wanamaker’s quote still rings true despite these advances. As much as digital makes it easier to track ad activity, digital makes it just as easy to fake ad activity using bots. Because of bots, we’re often unsure if our ads reach real people on some channels. For email, that has become especially obvious in the past few years.

iOS 15 was released on Sept. 20, 2021, and with it came a new email privacy feature that opens user emails inside a proxy server, whether a real user opened the email or not, leading to a spike in open rates. The email’s contents are then cached on a server and the cached version...