GM+ Member Britt just wrote the below in the community (and coined the term "honeypot links")...

After a few recent "viral giveaways" I noticed something weird with my email engagement.

The little "follow me on social" buttons above my signature all recieved the exact same number of clicks.

Weird, right?

When I looked into it, the clickers were all addresses from brands like McKinsey, Blackrock etc.

If you've ever seen this, this is what's happening.

Big brands have email security which clicks every link in your email to check it for spam and malicious content before the end recipient gets to see it.

Your ESP logs it as a click, even though it's not a real person.

Which throws off your tracking.

It looks good in the ESP, but the time on site and engagement post click is seconds.

On the surface, it looks liek you're doing well, but really nothing is actually happening with those clicks and there's no genuine engagement.

You don't even know if the real person is actually reading anything you send.

Here's the thing.

Cleaning this with a normal re-engagement campaign that has a "click this to stay subbed" isn't going to work because these systems click EVERY link.

So I needed to come up with a better system.

I adapted the normal re-engagement campaignt to focus on a specific, on-page action rather than a click.

Here's an overview of how it works...

1. I include a secret, hidden link in the emails only a bot will click
2. That tags them as a bot
3. There's a new sequence that starts (similar to a re-engagement email)
4. The user has to resubmit their email to stay subbed (not based on simple clicks)

I've done a more detailed breakdown in the GM+ Community you. can see by joining here. ​

I dropped that hidden link in an email yesterday and it got 232 link clicks.

That's 232 clicks per link my emails were getting not from people, but from bots.

So, if you had 5 links, your ESP would record 1160 clicks.

You can see how this would throw off your tracking, right?

In 7 days I'll know if these people are engaged or if they're simple bots, and I'll have a cleaner list at the end of it.

And I'll once again get a better idea of actual link clicks for engagement.

If you're getting suspect clicks and a regular re-engagement sequence isn't cutting it, I recommend trying this.

And if you want to see a video of how I set it up, check out the GM+ Community here.​

Pete "Bot killer" Boyle