Bot filter in Zoho Campaigns

The bot filter enhances the accuracy of email marketing metrics by differentiating and filtering out the bot-generated activities. This ensures that your email reports show genuine user interactions, giving you specific insights into the performance of your email campaigns.

This document will help you understand what bot filtering means, and the steps you need to follow to enable and disable the Bot Filtering option in Zoho Campaigns.

What is bot filtering?

Bots are automated programs that interact with your email campaigns. These interactions will be reflected in your email marketing reports in the form of clicks and open rates. Without techniques like the bot filtering option, it becomes quite impossible to differentiate between bot-generated activities and genuine user interactions. When bot-generated activities are filtered out using Zoho Campaigns' Bot filter option, you get an accurate report of how real users have engaged with your email campaigns. This insight into the behavior of your target audience will help you plan your email marketing strategies more effectively.

Key features

Toggle On/Off: Turn Bot Filtering on or off with a quick toggle in Settings >>General Settings.
Accurate Reporting: Bot opens and clicks are automatically removed from your reports, giving you a clearer view of genuine user engagement.
Transparency: We’ve added a visual indicator in your reports to show if Bot Filtering is active or inactive, so you always know what data you're viewing.

Note:

The Bot Filter option will be enabled by default. This implies that clicks and openings from bots will be excluded from your email campaign reports.
You must be the admin of your organization to enable or disable the bot filter.
It’s not possible to completely prevent bot clicks triggered by inbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and others. These clicks are performed to check the links in your email for safety before displaying them to the user. While there are methods to reduce the chances of these automated clicks, some bot clicks may still occur.

Features impacted by the bot filter settings

Given below is the list of features within Zoho Campaigns that will be impacted when you enable or disable the bot filter option:

Email campaign reports, including A/B campaigns and RSS campaigns.
Reports of email campaigns associated with other applications, including webinars, e-commerce, surveys, and events.
Follow up campaigns
Segments
Journeys

How to enable the bot filter

To enable the bot filter feature:

Click the Settings icon in the top-right corner.
Click Bot Filter under General.
Toggle the Bot Filter button.
Click Go Ahead.
The bot filter feature will be enabled.

Notes:

When the bot filter is enabled along with 'Exclude bot activities from entering segments’, recognized bots will not be allowed to enter the segments associated with respective email campaigns.

If the bot filter was enabled or disabled without this option being active while sending a campaign, and a bot has entered the segment as a contact, it will remain there despite enabling the bot filter option.
This is also true for the ‘Exclude bot activities from entering workflows’ option. Once a bot guises as a contact enters the journey, it will flow through all the workflows actions associated with the respective email campaign.
The options within segments and journeys that will be affected by enabling or disabling the bot filter are:
You can't completely restrict inbox providers from using automated bots to click on links in your emails for security checks. While certain methods can reduce the chances of bot clicks, there's no guarantee they will be completely prevented.

How to disable the bot filter

To disable the bot filter feature:

Click the Settings icon in the top-right corner.
Click Bot Filter under General.
Toggle the Bot Filter button.
Click Go Ahead.