Bot filter in Zoho Marketing Automation
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 Marketing Automation.
What is bot filtering?
Bots are automated programs that interact with your websites and 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 Marketing Automation's 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 >> Marketing Channels >> Email >> Bot filter.
- 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.
Features impacted by the bot filter settings
Given below is the list of features within Zoho Marketing Automation 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 Marketing Channels, and then Email.
- Click Bot Filter.
- Toggle the button to enable the Bot Filter.
You can also enable the 'Exclude bot activities from entering segments' and 'Exclude bot activities from entering journeys' options by checking the box near them.
Note:
- 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 journeys’ option. Once a bot guises as a contact enters the journey, it will flow through all the journey 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:
How to disable the bot filter
To disable the bot filter feature:
- Click the Settings icon in the top-right corner.
- Click Marketing Channels, and then Email.
- Click Bot filter.
- Toggle the button to disable the bot filter.
- Click Disable in the confirmation pop-up.