Bot filtering for emails

Set up bot filtering in your Email Preferences to exclude all suspected machine or bot clicks. A “bot click” in email refers to a click on hyperlinks within an email that’s generated by an automated program. By filtering these bot clicks, you can intentionally trigger and deliver messages to recipients who are engaged.

About bot clicks

Braze has a detection system that employs multiple inputs to identify suspected bot clicks, also referred to as non-human interactions (NHI). Bot clicks can distort your email engagement metrics by artificially inflating click rates. This approach allows us to differentiate between genuine human interactions and suspected bot activity to maintain the integrity of click engagement metrics and insights.

Metrics affected by bot clicks

The following Braze metrics can be affected by bot clicks:

• Total Click Rate
• Unique Click Rate
• Click-to-Open Rate
• Conversion Rate (if “Clicks campaign” is selected as the conversion event)
• Heatmap
• Certain segment filters

Braze Intelligence features that leverage click data on top of our detection systems may be impacted. Turning on the setting has the potential to disrupt our detection systems temporarily, which may result in a decrease in the metric or input due to this exclusion of suspected bot clicks:

• Intelligent Selection
• Intelligent Channel
• Intelligent Timing
• Experiment Step
  • Winning Path
  • Personalized Path
• Campaign
  • Winning Variant
  • Personalized Variant
• Estimated real open rate

Unsubscribes from suspected bot clicks will not be affected. Braze will continue to process all unsubscribe requests as usual. If you would like Braze to block these unsubscribes, submit product feedback.

Segmentation filters affected by bot filtering

The following segmentation filters can be affected by bot filtering for email messages:

• Clicked/Opened Campaign or Canvas With Tag
• Clicked/Opened Step
• Clicked Alias in Campaign
• Clicked Alias in Canvas Step
• Clicked Alias in Any Campaign or Canvas Step
• Last Engaged with Message
• Intelligent Channel

Turning on bot filtering

Go to Settings > Email Preferences. Then, select Remove bot clicks. This setting is applied at the workspace level.

Any suspected bot clicks will only be removed after the setting is turned on, and doesn’t apply retroactively to metrics in your workspace.

Fields in Email Click events for Currents and Snowflake

Braze will send the fields is_suspected_bot_click and suspected_bot_click_reason in Currents and Snowflake for an Email Click event.

Field	Data type	Description
is_suspected_bot_click	Boolean	Indicates that this is a suspected bot click. This will send as null values until you turn on the Remove bots clicks workspace setting. This approach allows you to programmatically understand when the filtering of suspected bot clicks has started in your workspace so you can accurately compare that against the data in Currents and Snowflake.
suspected_bot_click_reason	Array	Indicates the reason why this is a suspected bot click. This will populate with values, such as user_agent and ip_address, even if the bot filtering workspace setting is disabled. This field can provide insight into the potential impact of turning on this setting by comparing the number of clicks deriving from suspected bot clicks to human interactions.

Frequently asked questions

How will bot filtering impact my campaign’s performance?

This will not impact metrics for any previous campaigns already sent. When bot filtering is turned on in your workspace, Braze will start to filter out suspected bot clicks from all clicks. You may notice a drop in click rates, but the click rate is a more accurate representation of your users’ engagement with their email messages.

Will bot filtering prevent bots clicking on the Braze unsubscribe link from unsubscribing?

No. All unsubscribe requests will continue to be processed.

Are machine opens considered in the bot click filtering?

No.