How to Track Bot Clicks in Emails

Ever noticed bizarre spikes in click rates seconds after sending an email? It’s more common than you think.

Marketers often face this frustrating issue where their email campaign metrics—especially click-through rates (CTR)—look artificially inflated. But when you dig deeper, you realize: those weren’t human clicks. They were bots.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to identify and manage bot clicks effectively.

Why bot clicks are a problem

Bot clicks are automated interactions generated by security systems (like spam filters or link scanners) before an email even reaches the recipient. These bots are often designed to scan all the links in an email to ensure they’re safe—but they inadvertently trigger "click" events that ESPs record as real engagement.

This creates multiple problems:

• Artificially high CTRs: Your click-through rate may jump to 80–100% within seconds of sending an email. It looks impressive—but it’s not real.
• False signals: If you’re using clicks to trigger follow-up actions (like personalized journeys), bot clicks can send people down the wrong paths and trigger follow-up emails that don’t make sense to the recipients.
• Skewed A/B testing: Bots clicking every version of a CTA can wreck your ability to test what’s actually performing best, making it harder for you to understand which one is the better version of your email.

Why most ESPs struggle to offer reliable bot click detection

You might assume that detecting bot clicks is a solved problem, but most ESPs don’t offer reliable bot filtering. That’s because:

• Bot behavior constantly evolves and mimics human interaction more closely.
• ESPs risk filtering out genuine clicks and hurting deliverability.
• Some bots use legitimate-looking user agents, making detection complex.

That’s why proactive monitoring and segmentation on the marketer’s side are often more effective than waiting for built-in solutions. Fortunately, Mailmodo provides everything you need to do that.

How to track and manage bot clicks in Mailmodo

There are a few ways you can do this. Let’s explore them one by one:

1. Use link-wise click tracking to export and analyze raw click data

Mailmodo allows you to export click data at a granular level. Here’s how you can do that:

1. Go to your campaign in Mailmodo.
2. Open the Campaign Dashboard.
3. Click the 3-dot menu → Export Data > Clicks Data.
4. Download the CSV file.

Inside the CSV, you’ll find:

• Which recipients clicked
• Which links were clicked
• Timestamps and metadata

Here, you can analyze the data for suspicious patterns like:

• Multiple links clicked at the exact same timestamp
• Clicks registered within seconds of email delivery
• Recipients clicking every single link

These are some telltale signs of bot activity.

2. Use Click Maps for visual pattern recognition

Click Maps in Mailmodo provide a visual overlay showing which parts of your email received the most clicks. To view it, you can:

1. Open your campaign.
2. Navigate to the Click Maps tab.

Here, you can identify some tell-tale signs that you’re receiving bot clicks:

• Every link shows the same number of clicks
• Unusually high clicks on non-CTA links (like social media icons in the footer)

While this doesn’t give you specific user data, it helps you identify patterns at the template level that may signal bot behavior.

3. Use click-based segmentation to isolate suspected bot activity

You can also automatically exclude those users from future campaigns that show suspicious activity using segmentation.

For this, you can:

1. Go to Contacts > Create Segment.
2. Filter: User has clicked on a specific campaign.
3. Add conditions for multiple link clicks (or all links).
4. Create a segment labeled something like “Suspected Bots”.

You can later go ahead and check the contacts included in the segment to manually identify which ones are bots.

Takeaways

Bot clicks are an unavoidable part of modern email marketing, but they don’t have to derail your data. With a little setup and ongoing monitoring, you can keep your email metrics clean—and your strategies sharp. Use Mailmodo to not just easily identify but deal with bot clicks to ensure you get the real picture of your campaigns’ performance.