Understanding Verified Clicks for accurate email engagement metrics

Accurately measuring email engagement is one of the more nuanced challenges in newsletter publishing. ISPs and anti-phishing software routinely scan emails and test links for potential threats. This process generates automated clicks and inflates your click metrics, making it harder to understand how your audience is actually engaging with your content.

To give you data you can trust, beehiiv built Verified Clicks — a sophisticated filtering process that analyzes dozens of signals, including IP addresses, user agents, and click patterns, to identify and exclude non-human interactions. For example, if a recipient registers multiple clicks within seconds of opening an email, those are flagged as likely bot interactions. beehiiv cross-verifies this with additional data points to ensure accuracy.

The result? Cleaner, more reliable click data, so you can make confident, informed decisions about your content and strategy.

In the email ecosystem, engagement metrics are often distorted for legitimate reasons, including:

• Inflated Click Rates: Bots and anti-phishing tools scan email content and test links for potential threats, artificially increasing click counts.
• Authentication Changes: Platforms like Gmail and Yahoo require DMARC records for authentication, adding automated scrutiny that may further skew engagement data.

While these measures enhance security, they can significantly distort click metrics depending on your audience's email platform.

We built Verified Clicks to provide accurate, actionable data you can trust. 

Here’s how it works:

• Our Verified Clicks metric: Verified Clicks combines first and third-party data models to filter out bot activities and noise.
• Transparency and flexibility: We provide both unfiltered click data and verified metrics, allowing you to choose what works best for your needs.

With Verified Clicks, your click data is categorized into clear, actionable metrics:

• Total Clicks: All recorded clicks, including potential bot interactions.
• Verified Total Clicks: Clicks verified as genuine, filtered for accuracy.
• Unique Clicks: The number of individual users who clicked, regardless of frequency.
• Verified Unique Clicks: Individual verified users who clicked.
• Click-To-Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked on any link.
• Verified Click-To-Open Rate: The percentage of recipients verified as genuinely engaging.

By leveraging Verified Clicks, you’ll gain confidence in your email metrics while maintaining full visibility into all click interactions. This transparency allows you to make data-driven decisions with clarity and precision.

1. From the left panel, go to Newsletter > Posts. Click on one of your published posts to open its dashboard, then click on the Performance tab.  
   
   
   
2. Navigate to the Click-to-open rate box and click the arrow next to Show Verified Clicks. A dropdown will reveal the Verified click-to-open rate, Verified unique clicks, and Verified total clicks for the post.
   
   
   

1. From the left panel, go to Subscribers > All Subscribers. Click on one of your subscribers to open their dashboard/profile. 
   
   
   
2. Navigate to the Click-to-open rate box and click the arrow next to Verified CTOR. A dropdown will reveal the Verified Clicks percentage.