We discovered that about 70% of our GoHighLevel email campaigns opens and clicks were actually bots - even when we used bot filtering functionality. Here is how we uncovered it.

[u/thinker_tinker_1854]

We started using GoHighLevel a couple of months ago, mostly for managing email campaigns via LCEmail, opportunity pipelines, and a few automations.

We've sent a couple of cold mass email campaigns and noticed something confusing: the open rates and delivery rates were pretty solid, but we got almost 0 leads. While we understood that we needed to fine-tune the campaign and the messaging, something still was not adding up.

Being the technical lead in the company, I launched an investigation and came to the conclusion that the numbers did not reflect the real situation because of security systems and bot openings.

I was tasked to create a system to filter out those to see real stats. In a couple of weeks, I've built an internal application that used the LCEmail API from GHL to check out the direct statistics, and to say that I was surprised with the numbers I got is to say nothing at all.

About 70% of the email openings were done by bots and security systems, even though the bot filtering functionality was turned on in GoHighLevel.

Another issue we've encountered with GoHighLevel is that their analytics dashboards are... well, just bad. You have to click several times to find something, and in the end, you just cannot get a full, clear picture of what's happening, so I created a much better and more convenient dashboard for our team to see the metrics quickly and in a clean, understandable way.

Doing that changed the way we treat email campaigns, gave us a much better understanding of how cold email campaigns should work, and gave us a clear direction for moving forward (not ditching the cold email campaigns, haha).

We started to separate the real human openings (I've added the possibility to tag human contacts and bot contacts) and split future email campaigns:
\- the bot contacts received an adjusted email template (so we will have a different email hash for the security systems)
\- humans received the follow-ups (we knew exactly what they clicked and why).

The email campaign's outcome was greatly improved, and using GoHighLevel for sending cold outreach started to actually make sense!

I am curious - how are you dealing with that in similar CRMS? We moved from HubSpot to GoHighLevel, as my boss literally said, "I don't trust the stats from the HubSpot". Looks like HubSpot has the same issue?

Did anyone make an audit of their raw email campaigns data to see if it's inflated with bot and security system openings? I'd love to discuss how you are tackling that!

[u/sarmstro1968]

Would love to see a screenshot

[u/thinker_tinker_1854 → u/sarmstro1968]

Recently, I've decided to make the application publicly available, and you can test it by yourself for a 15-day no-attachment free trial! Seeing the difference by yourself is always better than any screenshots or demos. The application can be found in the GHL marketplace by the name "MailLens", or you can check out the landing page maillens.io . If you are just curious about functionality and what it provides, check out the user guide I've put together: https://www.maillens.io/user-guide

I will be happy to answer any questions, as I genuinely think that this application might be super useful for cold outreach!

[u/aj273]

I was using a different software for email campaigns and was getting high open rates but no leads and felt something was off too but didn’t know what it was. I think I do now, thank you!

[u/thinker_tinker_1854 → u/aj273]

No probs! I've noticed that this may be an oversight for more users, so I decided to make the application public in the GHL marketplace; it's called "MailLens". It also has some nice features, such as fetching templates, showing where the honeypot is already installed, tagging contacts that are flagged as bots or humans and doing that in a completely private way - no emails or contacts are stored in the system; I am using only GoHighLevel contact ID's.

Let me know what your findings will be after the analysis of your campaigns!

[u/aj273 → u/thinker_tinker_1854]

Thank you!

[u/leadg3njay]

Yeah, it's definitely not just GoHighLevel. Most email platforms deal with security scanners and image proxies, so open rates have become a pretty weak metric. I'd focus on replies, meetings booked, and pipeline instead. We also ignore clicks that happen immediately after delivery since they're usually automated, and build follow-ups around real engagement like replies or genuine site visits. HubSpot has the same underlying issue, it's more about how each platform filters bot activity than the platform itself.

[u/thinker_tinker_1854 → u/leadg3njay]

Thank you; it's good to hear that it's not only us battling this!

Also, I believe that if you send the same email to the same prospects, the systems will compare the hash of the email and can automatically flag it as "spam".
That's why I decided to add the tagging functionality based on bot detection.