Auto Activity Metrics Visualized – Relationship One

January 30, 2023 Stan

As marketers, our goal is to identify the best and most engaged audience possible to drive leads and nurture our customers. To accomplish this, we are always at the mercy of the data we are provided with. If this data is manipulated or skewed without our knowledge, any marketing we do that is reliant on it will be pointless. To this end, Oracle has introduced updated reporting and metrics to help us in one specific area: auto activity metrics.

In September of 2021, Apple introduced their Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) setting. This setting, when turned on, would block an Apple Mail app user’s tracking pixel from being picked up by third parties and would ‘auto open’ the email. While that alone is impactful for marketers, there are many other email scanning and security tools being used by businesses that scan an email prior to a user even seeing it, which not only creates an ‘auto open’ but also an ‘auto click’, because as the security software scans the email, it clicks each identified link to make sure it does not contain any malware or other malicious material.

The impact of these auto metrics can be widespread, as it can cause skewed reporting and unintended decisioning in an email campaign where email open and email click are being used to determine the next steps within the flow of that campaign.

Auto Activity Metrics Visualized

Oracle, in their 22A release, enabled ‘auto opens’ to be automatically removed from Total Opens and any other associated open metrics. In their 22B release, ‘auto clicks’ generated by bots or scanning tools were then also automatically removed from Total Clicks and any other associated clickthroughs. In the 22C release, auto open and auto click were expanded to additional subject areas within Insight reporting:

Campaign Activity by Activity Date
Campaign Analysis
Email Activity
Email Analysis by Send Date

Most recently, in the November 2022 22D release, Oracle introduced the Auto Activity Analysis report which provides Insight users with a monthly breakdown of auto generated metrics (auto opens and auto clicks) by campaign. The report also provides data visualizations to show a comparison for open and click activities. You can find this report by navigating to Insight >> Campaigns >> Auto Activity Analysis

The benefit of these reports is that it empowers you with a greater understanding of how your audience is impacted by MPP and other scanning and security tools so that you can adjust not only your reporting (inside and outside of Eloqua) but also how you shape your campaigns for these contacts.

I hope this breakdown on auto metrics was helpful! To learn more about reporting visit the Relationship One blog and as always, feel free to reach out to us, we’d love to hear from you!

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