Sometimes, the click activity observed in SMS or MMS campaigns may be associated with bot activity rather than genuine human engagement. Specific mobile devices can have bots or crawlers installed that automatically click on links within SMS or MMS campaigns. As a result, click events may be recorded in customer profiles even when the customer did not click on the link in the delivered message.
To identify this issue, you can examine three key aspects of click events:
1. Check the user agent in the campaign click event.
2. Review the IP address in the campaign click event.
3. Analyze any unusual click behavior within the customer profile.
These steps can help distinguish between legitimate user interactions and automated bot clicks.
User Agent
The "user-agent" present in the campaign event can identify these clicks. There are countless (and growing) crawler bots from search engines, scrapers, index tools, etc., so they are constantly evolving. Thus, producing definitive lists without constant updates/maintenance reactive to new bot instances is hard. However, the most common bot offenders (often search crawlers) can be identified.
Examples of bot user agents:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 Google-PageRenderer Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
When creating reports on clicks from SMS and MMS campaigns, we recommend filtering out user agents with the word "bot" to identify obvious crawlers. Additionally, investigate known SMS and MMS crawlers to filter out "fake" bot clicks in your campaigns. Adjust your filtering criteria based on the bots relevant to your customer profiles.
Remember, filtering may vary based on the devices your customers use.
IP Address
To look at click activity further, please check the IP address associated with the click event. You can use online tools to determine the IP's location, which can help you assess whether the activity is suspicious. For example, if the IP is from a different state than where the user typically resides or is associated with services like Google Proxy or other companies, this might raise red flags. You can filter out these IP addresses when creating a click activity report.
Click Behavior
Another indicator of suspicious activity is an unusually high number of clicks from a single phone number within a very short time frame. This pattern typically suggests automation rather than human interaction, pointing to potential bot activity. You can try to find a unifying parameter for these click events and then use it to create a filter when evaluating the campaign.
Assessing the issues mentioned above can help you identify bot activity within your campaigns, leading to more accurate reporting on click activities in customer profiles.