Background on "Fake" Opens/Clicks

Open and click rates give you insight into how well your campaign content is capturing recipients' attention, so you can adjust it accordingly.

To protect networks and identify potentially harmful emails, some security tools follow every link in an email to check for malicious destinations before delivering it to the recipient. This can register as an "open" or "click" that the recipient never actually made, which can distort your campaign's performance metrics.

Liberation Campaign already filters out actions from known bot user-agents, but that alone isn't foolproof – which is why Smart Tracking exists.

How Smart Tracking Works

• An ignore list keeps track of IPs that have been flagged by automated trap rules. If a legitimate subscriber's IP is mistakenly flagged, it can be marked inactive so future actions from that IP are recorded normally again.
• Each email includes a hidden tracking element used as part of this detection.
• Every open/click is checked against a few signals: whether the IP is on the ignore list, how quickly the action happened after delivery (very fast opens/clicks can indicate automated activity), and how many actions happened in a short window (a burst of activity in a few seconds suggests a bot rather than a person).

Using It

Smart Tracking options appear under the campaign tracking settings during campaign setup. It's off by default and must be enabled per campaign, with opens/clicks tracking also turned on for it to take effect.

Flagged IPs and activity can be reviewed and managed from within your account if you need to double-check whether something was filtered incorrectly – for example, if you're testing your own campaign from your office IP and notice your own opens aren't being counted.

Notes

This is a newer feature and the underlying detection rules may be refined over time to stay effective, so they aren't published publicly.