What do we mean by real activity in marketing?
Real activity is based on real human interactions. In other words, real activity tracks the actions your subscribers take when interacting with your messaging.
In marketing, what matters most is understanding genuine customer engagement. Measuring real activity helps ensure that the opens, clicks, and conversions in your reports come from real people, not automated systems or bots. By focusing on verified human behavior, you gain more accurate insights, build stronger, more relevant campaigns that respond only to real interactions leading to better overall performance.
Why measuring real activity matters?
When recipients open an email, they often interact with various security measures like anti-malware software, enterprise security and monitoring software, browser extensions, or antivirus firewalls. Those same systems, meant to keep email secure, may proactively investigate messages, sometimes even clicking on links within emails. While a link has been clicked, the system, not the intended recipient, is being counted in the click rate.
While this scanning helps protect recipients, it can skew your data. Without measuring real activity, you risk:
- Inaccurate open and click rates
- A/B test results you cannot trust
- Automation triggered at the wrong times
- Misleading campaign performance reports
This issue has become more urgent with the rise of privacy technologies and the growing use of security bots. These trends especially affect industries like retail, finance, and media, where accurate engagement data is essential for customer experience and strategic decision-making.
What counts as non-human interaction?
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. Also, all of this tracking is done in real-time. It is not applied to historical data.
Non-human interactions are detected through:
- Bait link clicks — A click on a link that humans don’t usually follow.
- Hosting organization clicks — A significant number of clicks identified as coming from a data center, VPN or other hosting organization.
- Shadow user clicks — Clicks on a single link, first by a user and then quickly followed by a hosting organization.
- Known sources — Opens from well known user agents and/or Email Providers.
- Significant rate clicks — The most common detection method, including multiple, sustained, fast clicks in a short period of time.
- Unique links scanned —Multiple unique links are clicked within quick succession (less than 30 seconds).
In addition to these factors, we also consider Apple MPP. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) preloads email content through Apple servers to protect user privacy, which can create false opens not driven by real user behavior. The Marigold Platform identifies these system-generated events as non-human activity, ensuring that reporting and automations are based on genuine engagement.
These tools simulate user actions but do not reflect real intent from a human. They are helpful for security, but they distort performance metrics. Measuring Real Activity filters these signals out, giving marketers a clearer view of actual subscriber behavior and ensures that campaign automation responds to real human interactions.
Why measuring real activity matters for performance
More accurate reporting
Only real clicks and opens are included, so your metrics reflect true human engagement.
Smarter A/B testing
You can test and optimize based on real human interactions.
Reliable automation
Workflows are activated by genuine behavior rather than background system activity, improving targeting and reducing message fatigue.
More effective segmentation
Audiences are built around authentic actions so targeting becomes more precise.
Measure what matters
In an environment where bots and privacy tools can distort engagement metrics, measuring Real Activity means you focus on how your customers genuinely engage, the data that matters.
