Overview
These systems automatically visit every link in an email before it is delivered to the recipient, and each automated visit is recorded as a click in iCampaign, even though no real person ever saw or clicked it.
iCampaign has deployed a filter to identify and exclude automated clicks from reports, so click counts now reflect real human activity. This article explains how scanner inflation works, how to recognize it, and what to expect from your click data going forward.
Key Concepts
Email security gateways: Software used by organizations — especially government agencies, healthcare systems, and large enterprises — to automatically scan every link in an incoming email for malware or phishing before delivering it to the recipient's inbox.
Automated clicks: When a security gateway visits a link, that visit is logged as a click in iCampaign, even though no human opened or interacted with the email.
Click inflation: The result of many automated clicks being counted alongside real human clicks, causing reported click totals to appear dramatically higher than actual engagement.
iCampaign automated click filter: A fix deployed by the iCampaign development team that identifies and excludes automated scanner clicks so that campaign reports reflect only genuine human activity.
How It Works
When you send a campaign email to recipients at organizations that use email security gateways (such as government, healthcare, or large enterprise domains), the gateway intercepts the email before delivery and automatically sends a request to every link in the email. This is done to check whether any link leads to malware or a phishing site.
Each of those automated requests is indistinguishable from a real click at the tracking level, so iCampaign logs one click per link per recipient processed by the scanner. If your email contains six links and 200 recipients are behind a security gateway, you could see over 1,200 clicks recorded before a single person has even opened the email.
This explains why click counts can be orders of magnitude higher than YouTube views, website visits, or any other external measure of engagement — the security scanner clicks a link but does not load a video player, complete a page visit, or take any action a human would take.
Signs That Scanner Inflation Is Affecting Your Report
Nearly identical click counts across all links: A real audience never clicks every single link in an email at the same rate. If your website link, YouTube link, Facebook link, and LinkedIn link all show almost the same number of clicks, automated scanning is the likely cause.
A spike of clicks within the first hour of sending: Security gateways act immediately upon delivery. A large, sudden spike in click activity right after sending — followed by very little activity afterward — is a strong indicator of scanner traffic rather than human engagement.
Click or open rates far above normal: Real campaign click rates typically fall in the 2–5% range. If your campaign shows a 40–60% click rate, automated scanners are almost certainly inflating the number.
Recipient domains from high-security organizations: Government agencies (e.g., .gov domains), healthcare systems, and large enterprises are the most common users of email security gateways.
Large discrepancy between clicks and external analytics: If a link to a YouTube video shows hundreds or thousands of clicks in iCampaign but only a handful of views on YouTube, scanner inflation is a likely explanation. YouTube only counts a view when the video player loads and playback begins — a security scanner request does not trigger this.
Important Notes
The iCampaign automated click filter is now active. The iCampaign development team has released an update that identifies and excludes automated scanner clicks from campaign reports. Your click counts now reflect real human engagement, not security gateway traffic.
iCampaign clicks and YouTube views will still not match exactly. Even after automated clicks are filtered out, a small difference between iCampaign click counts and YouTube view counts is normal and expected. iCampaign records a click the moment someone opens a link. YouTube counts a view only when the video player fully loads and playback begins. These are two different events, so the numbers will not be identical — but they should now be much closer and more proportional to each other.
This is not an error in iCampaign's click tracking. The underlying click tracking works correctly. The inflation was caused by external security systems on the recipient side, not by a problem with iCampaign reporting.
If you notice click counts that still seem unusually high after the filter has been applied, or if you have questions about your campaign analytics, contact Dazos Support for assistance.