Why do reported clicks sometimes exceed delivered messages?
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If your analytics show more clicks than delivered messages, your first reaction might be that something's broken. But this is actually a known pattern, and the explanation is usually straightforward.
Total clicks vs. unique clicks. Total click counts include every click event, including the same person clicking multiple links multiple times. One subscriber can generate ten clicks in a single email. If your campaign had 1,000 deliveries and 200 highly engaged readers each clicked five links, you'd see 1,000 clicks from 1,000 deliveries. That ratio is 1:1 but it's technically possible for total clicks to exceed deliveries if engagement is very high.
More commonly though, especially for B2B senders, the culprit is security link scanning. Corporate email gateways from providers like Proofpoint and Mimecast click every link in every email they process, often multiple times from multiple scanning nodes. If your email has ten links and a gateway scans with three nodes, that's potentially 30 clicks from a single delivered message before any human has seen it.
When clicks are well above deliveries (say 3x or more), it's almost certainly scanner activity at scale. The clicks will often cluster around delivery time, come from corporate IP ranges, and include unsubscribe links and footer links that no real subscriber would click.
The fix is to enable bot-click filtering in your ESP if they offer it, or to look at unique click counts instead of total clicks as your primary metric.
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