Should we be counting clicks in our nurture streams

[adele_briggs]

We are looking at ways to optimise our nurture campaigns. Currently we have some clicks from bots which are pushing people through too quickly. I would like to know how others manage this.

Options I'm considering

1) just accept that some will go through and deal with them individually - don't know how many there are

2) don't count the clicks on emails as part of the nuture - clicks are measured as a level of engagement from the nurtures/emails

3) ...any other suggestions

thanks

[Michael_Florin]

May I break the question down into two questions?

1. Should I count clicks to measure engagement?

2. Should I have Trigger Campaigns that set a program status to "Clicked" and/or have other flow actions based on clicks?

In general, I'd say yes to 1) and no to 2). Clicks, even if unreliable as absolute figures, can be used to compare engagement with emails. A higher click rate is better than a lower one. (Okay, that's probably too trivial...) But I would not set up Smart Campaigns that listen to clicks, and I would not use clicks to move persons from one stream to a higher stream. Form submits and interactions with content represent better triggers to move persons through the funnel.

[Ankit_Kumar3]

Hi @adele_briggs ,

#3 - you can set up a separate campaign to move the people on the basis of click & visited web page activity combination because every genuine click also has page visit activity associated with this until it's a third-party URL. But in the case of bot click, we have only click activity. EDITED 2021-07-14 BY MOD: this isn’t accurate, advanced mail scanners render pages in a headless browser and so do create Visit Web Page activities.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is incorrect, Ankit. Mail scanners absolutely create pageviews.

[Ankit_Kumar3]

Thanks, @SanfordWhiteman to correct me, but I have gone through such cases many time where we received a high click rate on our emails and when we filtered out by adding page visit activity then there were very few.  So does it mean that not all scanners can create page visit activities?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Some primitive ones do not...but the ones that work (at detecting phishing and malware) do!

[Katja_Keesom]

And to add insult to injury, you also need to take into account you won't see all page visits, depending on whether your lead accepted cookies or not. So your combination will always be off in both directions.