Bot Detection

Email inboxes often use automated bots to pre-scan or pre-open emails for security and link safety checks. These bot interactions can inflate your open and click metrics, making it harder to understand how your real recipients are engaging with your emails. Conversion automatically detects and flags bot activity using two complementary sets of rules: proximity rules and IP inspection. Flagged events are filtered out of your performance metrics when the Include bots toggle is turned off on the Performance tab.

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Proximity rules

Proximity rules look at the timing of events for each individual send to identify activity that is too fast to be human. Events are grouped by send (per recipient), sorted by timestamp, and then checked pairwise against two thresholds, both set to 1 second.

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IP inspection

Alongside proximity rules, Conversion inspects the IP address associated with each open and click and checks it against a predefined list of known bot IPs. This list is maintained continuously and is built from:

• Industry best practices. Publicly recognised bot IP ranges, including those from major providers such as Google.
• Conversion’s own detection. Additional IP addresses identified by Conversion’s internal bot detection algorithms.

Any open or click originating from an IP on this list is flagged as bot activity.