How to Use HubSpot: Filter Out Bot Activity for Clean Reporting

Dustin Brackett

January 20, 2021

If you sell to or market to Fortune 500 and larger companies, you may be seeing that when you send a marketing email to multiple contacts within a company all of them are being opened at the same time or even clicked at the same time. Oftentimes this can mean that security bots are causing false opens and clicks before the email is even delivered to its intended contact. If you want to have clean data and accurate reporting on your email marketing campaigns, you need to filter out those bot activities. Here is how you can do just that in HubSpot.

We are starting a new series of blog posts in order to help our readers get the most out of their HubSpot portals with tips and tricks on how to use HubSpot to its potential. Some features and tools can be hidden or hard to find. We're uncovering those tools in our How to Use HubSpot series. Follow along and catch all of our HubSpot tips here.

For this tip, first we need to understand the issue. Most businesses are not selling to the Facebooks, Googles, Apples, and IBMs of the world. But those that are have likely struggled with reporting on email campaigns. If you are sending marketing emails to these mammoth companies, you likely are experiencing trouble reporting on those email campaigns because cyber security bots are used to open, click, and scan your marketing emails before they are ever delivered to the intended recipient. In this case, many times you will see high open rates and click rates because it is counting bot activities.

In order to have accurate reporting, you need to turn on bot filtering within your HubSpot portal. Here's how to do that:

In your HubSpot account, click the settings icon in the main navigation bar (top right).
In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Tracking & Analytics > Tracking Code.
Click the Advanced Tracking tab.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click to toggle the Bot filtering switch on to filter all activity from known internet bots.

In the bottom left, click Save.

By doing this, you'll be on your way to better analytics and far more accurate reporting on your marketing email campaigns.

Check back regularly to find other tips on how to use HubSpot!

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