by Zoe Fisher 
Bots are an email marketer’s worst nightmare. They mean skewed reporting and manual workarounds to identify true engaged recipients versus the dreaded bots. Since early November, you may have seen a reduction in your bot activity on Pardot. This is due to a new update – Pardot Metrics Guard. And the best part is that you didn’t have to do anything to enable it!
What is a bot?
A security bot protects a company’s domain by stopping harmful links reaching the recipients. They flag anything that could be harmful, such as viruses and spam. This works by scanning incoming emails before the recipient is able to view it, and clicking on anything that could potentially be dangerous. As the security bot scans the email before it actually reaches the inbox, this means that the bot is the first to open all of the links in an email.
How does a bot affect reporting?
Due to the security bot opening and checking all of the links in incoming emails, it can appear in your reporting that recipients are super engaged with your emails, clicking on everything! However, this can simply be a security bot being extremely vigilant. Therefore your click-through rate could be an inaccurate representation of the performance of your emails.
The latest from Pardot
Earlier this week, Pardot released the following statement:
We built Metrics Guard for Email to watch for activity that isn’t really part of your hard-earned metrics. This brand-new service monitors email clicks and opens to identify patterns that are clearly bot-based, and it keeps those activities out of Pardot entirely. In its first week, Metrics Guard for Email kept 2 million scanner clicks from inflating our marketers’ metrics and triggering actions that shouldn’t have happened.
This is a big win for customers who find that their email reporting is difficult to navigate.
Pardot Metrics Guard for Email keeps engagement data clean so that click metrics are accurate and only truly engaged prospects can become qualified. This has been in place behind the scenes since early November – with no need to enable or switch anything on!
Find out more about optimising email campaigns here.