Advertisers Could Soon Demand 'Verified Clicks'
A report from Omnivery indicates that bot-driven email interactions are surging, particularly in consumer inboxes like Gmail and Outlook. This trend is forcing publishers to reconsider how they track engagement, potentially shifting toward 'verified clicks' to ensure data accuracy.
Why it matters
The rise of automated bot traffic threatens the reliability of email marketing metrics, which are essential for digital advertising revenue.
A state of the email bots report from email sending platform Omnivery shows the extent to which big tech titans are influencing the inbox and having an impact on the email metrics publishers leverage for tracking engagement, which might soon force publishers to change course and move toward the “verified click.”
As reported by AMO earlier this year, bot clicks, which were thought to only be a problem with corporate email inboxes, are infiltrating consumer inboxes and newsletters.
A bot click, very simply, is an automated interaction with an email. While it sounds malicious, it usually isn’t. It is typically generated by the email provider’s security systems, which do pre-fetching and scanning of links before an email gets delivered. B2C bot clicks have increased from 2% in 2023 to 16% this year, according to Omnivery’s new report.
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