You send a campaign. Within ninety seconds, a third of your B2B list has clicked. It feels great for about a minute, until you notice the clicks hit every single link in the email, in order, at the same second.
No human does that. A security scanner does.
Who is clicking
Many companies route incoming email through security tools that check links for malware and phishing before the message reaches the inbox. To do that, the tool visits the links itself. Your email platform cannot see the difference, so it records a click.
These tools are doing a good job for the people they protect. The problem is only on your side: your reports now mix real interest with automated checks.
Why it matters for marketers
- A/B tests stop meaning anything. If scanners click both versions equally, the real difference between them gets buried.
- Lead scoring goes wrong. A prospect who never opened the email can suddenly look "highly engaged" and get passed to sales.
- Automations fire too early. "Clicked the pricing link, send the follow-up" workflows trigger for people who never saw the email.
- You make worse decisions. You keep sending to segments that look engaged but are not.
How to spot scanner clicks
Scanner clicks tend to share a few traits:
- They arrive within seconds of delivery.
- They click many or all links in the email.
- They come from cloud or security vendor networks, not home or mobile networks.
The last one is the most reliable, and it is exactly what an IP network check gives you. When someone lands on your page from an email link, look up their IP. If it belongs to a datacenter or a known scanning network, mark the click as automated.
What to do with that information
Keep the page the same for everyone. Do not show scanners a different page from the one humans get. That is called cloaking, it is how phishing kits behave, and security vendors will flag your domain for it.
Instead, change what you count. Send a tag to your analytics or CRM saying "this click was automated," and build your reports and automations on human clicks only. Our next post walks through a simple way to set that up.