Bot Interaction Detection

Introduction

Engagement metrics only matter if they’re real. That’s why bot detection is essential to modern marketing platforms. It ensures the opens, clicks, and conversions you see in reports reflect actual customer behavior, not noise from automated systems scanning your campaigns behind the scenes.

Therefore, Bot Interaction Detection is integrated within Engage to aid in identifying bot activity.

For a profound understanding of what bot detection is and why it matters, refer to this article.

 

How are bots detected?

Marigold uses growing industry-standards and proprietary techniques to detect bots.
Differentiating between real activity and interaction by email providers and privacy software can be complex. We use an algorithm trained on their behavioral patterns to decide what interaction comes from your subscribers and what interaction comes from email providers and privacy software. This kind of differentiation is an art and not a science – it's constantly evolving – but our algorithm is constantly learning and adapting to continually improve accuracy.

Refer to this article for an overview of behaviors that could result in bot detection.

 

Impacted Engage functionality

Marigold's Bot Interaction detection within Engage has an impact on:

• Journey reporting

When the bot interaction detection feature is activated, a filter is available in the Journey reports to view data based on real activity, bot activity, or all activity. By default, All is selected. If bot detection is not activated for your environment, you will only have one option in the drop-down: Real activity.

• Generic Exports

The exported data contains a field indicating if it's a real (human) interaction or a bot interaction.

Note: Generic Exports contain a uniform set of system usage data that can be delivered by Marigold to their Engage platform users.
These files will make it possible to get the history of communications and interactions done with their install.
More info on Generic Exports can be found after logging into the MyEngage Portal.

Technical Note: For bot detection in Generic Exports, two optional fields are used in the Interaction table.
- IS_POTENTIAL_BOT : Flagging potential bot activity.
- BOT_DETECTION_TYPE : Describes how the bot was detected.
Note that these fields are not available by default, and can be added on request through a Support ticket.