Issue
Customers are seeing excessive clicks on links when viewing campaign statistics. This doesn't matter if Individual, Anonymous, or Overall tracking is enabled. Clicks on the campaign well exceed the number of opens and recipients.
Reason
ContactMonkey tracks clicks in an email based on the times a link is accessed and ties it to a unique identifier. However, specific security software can trigger a false or Ghost Click when accessing the link. This can happen when the security software attempts to verify the link, such as in the case of Microsoft's SafeLinks or Mimecast, to name a couple. This software is meant to protect organizations from phishing attacks.
As a result, when the phishing security software verifies a link, this can lead to multiple "additional clicks" for every email sent to each recipient.
The solutions will involve a customer's IT or Security team considering the changes, and they should be engaged in the solution process when this situation occurs.
Solutions
| Please involve your company's IT or Security team when considering the following changes |
Customers have a couple of solutions to consider. These possible changes typically involve modifying how the Email Link Legitimacy Verification Software behaves.
Adding ContactMonkey to the customer allowlist
Customer Administrators can consider adding ContactMonkey to a list of verified vendor sites that are verified automatically and will not need to be "clicked" to be verified. For example, in Microsoft Safelinks, Customer Administrators can adjust their policy and note not to rewrite the ContactMonkey URLs.
The ContactMonkey URLs customers will need to authorize are dependent on the region where the organization's ContactMonkey environment resides
| Location | Domain |
|
USA
|
contactmonkey.com |
| Australia | contactmonkey.au tkau.cmnky.co |
| Canada | contactmonkey.ca tkca.cmnky.co |
| Europe | contactmonkeyeu.com tk.cmnky.co |
Adding a CustomURL to the organization and then adding the URL to the customer allowlist
Customer Administrators can also consider setting up a Custom URL with ContactMonkey. This feature from ContactMonkey rewrites references to ContactMonkey's URLs in an email, including links, to a Custom URL that has been authorized by our customers.
For example, the fictional company Contapso, with the domain contapso.ca, may want to create and provide ContactMonkey with a subdomain, cm.contapso.ca. They can then add this domain to their allowlist and have ContactMonkey set up a Custom URL with cm.contapso.ca so that all links will begin with https://cm.contapso.ca