Bot Activity is Breaking Your Marketing — Here’s What To Do
Your email marketing reports look amazing — open rates soaring, click-through rates through the roof. But something doesn’t add up. Sales isn’t seeing the same magic. Leads are dropping off. Nurture campaigns are misfiring. What’s going on?
The problem? Your marketing automation platform could be muddying your metrics with fake engagement. Security filters, bot clicks, and automated engagement signals are polluting your CRM, leading your team to pursue prospects that don’t exist—while missing real opportunities.
Let’s break it down.
How Bots Distort Email Opens and Clicks
Not all email opens and clicks are real — many are generated by automated processes rather than human interaction. Two key culprits distort marketing metrics and make it harder to track real engagement:
- Link Scanners (Fake Clicks) – Many email security tools automatically scan links in emails before they reach a recipient’s inbox. These scanners click some or all links to check for malicious content, inflating click-through rates and triggering false engagement signals. This means your "hot leads" may never have even seen your email.
- Image Pre-fetching (Fake Opens) – Email clients like Apple Mail and Gmail often pre-load email images, including tracking pixels, before the recipient actually opens the message. This enhances security and improves user experience but causes artificial open rates, making it look like an email was opened even if the recipient never saw it.
The result? Inflated metrics that give a false sense of success. In December 2024, over 60% of email opens and 32% of clicks were from bots—meaning much of what looked like engagement wasn’t real.
The Three Big Problems of Fake Data
Fake data is more than just an annoyance — it’s an expensive problem. Every bot click, every misleading open, and every fake lead distorts your marketing performance, leading to wasted budget, misaligned strategies, and frustrated sales teams.
Here are the three key challenges:
1. Inflated Marketing Metrics
Marketing dashboards should be a source of truth, not fiction. Yet, bot clicks and security filters skew your engagement data — giving you the illusion of success when in reality, your audience may not have even seen your email.
- A/B tests? Based on bot-driven opens.
- Budget decisions? Allocated to campaigns with fake engagement.
- CTRs? High, but where are the conversions?
Without clean data, marketers risk making budget decisions on false performance indicators, wasting time optimizing for engagement that doesn’t exist.
2. Passing Bad Leads to Sales: The Ultimate Time-Waster
Picture this: Your sales team gets a list of ‘hot leads.’ They make calls, send emails, follow up... and hear nothing but crickets. Why? Because those leads were bots that clicked every link in your email without a human ever being involved.
- Wasted sales time = wasted revenue.
- Lower conversion rates = lower confidence in marketing’s leads.
- Sales and marketing alignment? More like sales and marketing friction.
Solution: Filtering out fake clicks before they reach your CRM ensures that sales only gets real, engaged prospects.
3. Broken Automations: Your Nurture Flows Are in Chaos
Email automations are supposed to guide prospects through a logical journey. But when bots interact first, your carefully crafted workflows collapse:
- Leads get skipped ahead in the journey without reading a word.
- Follow-up emails are triggered before the recipient has even opened the first one.
- Retargeting campaigns end up chasing... security filters.
Solution: If only real engagement is tracked, your automations actually work as intended. That means less bot nonsense, more genuine conversations.
So, What Can You Do?
We’re glad you asked.
Some marketing automation platforms, such as Pardot, Marketo, ClickDimensions, and Mailchimp, attempt to filter bot activity, but they fall short. We've identified that 52.5% of clicks generated across the investment industry are fake. In our tests using published blocked IP addresses, Pardot only caught 0.02% of clicks and Marketo trapped 0.4%.
You could manually filter out bot clicks, sorting through engagement logs, identifying suspicious patterns, and cross-referencing IP addresses. But at what cost? Your time is worth more.
This is one of the many headaches we take away from our clients.
StoneShot BotShield
At StoneShot, we’ve been refining our BotShield technology to help marketers get clean, reliable engagement data. Our latest upgrade detects over 50% more fake clicks, filtering out bot activity before it distorts your reports. Here’s how it works:
- Advanced Pattern Recognition – Identifies automated behaviors and removes bot-driven interactions.
- Refined Lead Qualification – Ensures only real engagement influences lead scoring.
- Stronger Sales Alignment – Gives sales teams confidence that the leads they receive are truly engaged.
With BotShield, your marketing and sales teams can finally trust their engagement data again. No more chasing fake leads, no more distorted reports—just accurate insights, better decisions, and stronger performance.
By taking proactive measures to combat bot activity, businesses can ensure their marketing budget is directed toward real engagement and meaningful conversions. Marketers can finally focus on creating relevant, high-impact content instead of cleaning up inaccurate reports. Want to see how it works?
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Frequently Asked Questions
Check your engagement spikes. If you see sudden, high open and click rates but no corresponding conversions, you’re likely dealing with bots.
Maybe. Most platforms capture clicks before filtering them. That means metrics, lead scoring, and automations are already broken before you even start filtering. Others trap fake data before it messes with your metrics, but require manual management.
Time wasted. Budget misallocated. Sales misled. Marketing performance misinterpreted. The impact of fake data goes far beyond inflated vanity metrics - it undermines your entire strategy.
