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Bot click filtering

Enterprise email security systems click every link in every email before it reaches a human. GetReplies filters these out so your analytics reflect real prospect behaviour.

When you send an email to someone at an enterprise company, their corporate email infrastructure often includes a security product — tools like Proofpoint, Mimecast, or Microsoft Defender — that automatically follows every link in the email before delivering it. This is designed to protect employees from phishing attacks.

The side effect is that your link-click analytics are polluted with bot activity that has nothing to do with real prospect interest.

The problem with unfiltered click data

If you rely on link clicks to measure prospect interest — and your tool doesn't filter bot clicks — you will see a distorted picture:

  • An email sent to a Fortune 500 company shows a 100% click rate — but the security scanner clicked the link, not the prospect

  • You follow up aggressively on contacts who 'showed interest' — when in reality they never engaged

  • Your click-based sequences trigger prematurely — moving prospects through the funnel before any real intent is shown

How GetReplies filters bot clicks

GetReplies identifies and removes bot clicks using a combination of signals:

  • Click timing. Security scanners click links within milliseconds of delivery — before a human could possibly read the email. Clicks that arrive in under a few seconds are flagged as bot activity.

  • Click clusters. Security scanners click the link multiple times at the same time. Clicks that arrive together are flagged as bot activity.

  • Other activity. GetReplies has a lot of logical checks to filter bot clicks. We continuously innvoate on providing accurate click signals.

Why this matters in practice

If you are doing outreach to enterprise buyers — large companies in the US, Middle East, or India — there is a good chance their email is routed through a security gateway that scans links.

Without bot filtering, your engagement analytics would be meaningless for these segments. With bot filtering, the click data you do see reflects a human who made a deliberate choice to open a link.

What this means for how you measure campaigns

Because GetReplies filters both fake opens (by not using tracking pixels) and bot clicks (through active filtering), the analytics you see in your campaign dashboard reflect actual human behaviour. This means:

  • A 5% reply rate in GetReplies is a real 5% — not inflated by bot activity

  • Contacts marked as 'engaged' have genuinely interacted with your outreach

  • Sentiment labels (Positive / Neutral / Negative) are based on real replies, not phantom opens

⚙ What clean analytics look like in GetReplies

Typical email reply rate

3–4% on a well-targeted campaign

Typical LinkedIn reply rate

10–20% on a connection + message sequence

Open rate

Not shown — pixel tracking disabled

Bot clicks

Filtered — not counted in analytics

Real clicks

Counted — from human user agents only

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