When sending SMS it's crucial to have accurate CTR data to optimise the list, text and landing page performance. That’s why we built an intelligent for clicks tracking mechanism to not count every engagement with the offer link as a click.

Wherever you use your own solution for tracking clicks you may face a certain discrepancy between the click rate on SMSEdge and third-party platforms.

SMSEdge will show you less clicks than other platforms. It's because other platforms use a different logic to count the amount of clicks. When we filter a click we do that just for analytics purposes we still forward the click to the landing page as to avoid losing traffic.

All the clicks detailed information is available in the Analytics ➡️ Click Analysis. Here you can check your data under certain tabs or click Download Click Report button to export report as .csv file.

Now let's talk about Filtered Clicks. We filter them and exclude them from the displayed CTR.

When we see a click that might be from an automated system and not a mobile phone we do not count it. Carriers and mobile apps can automatically open the link to check or preview the content that is sent. We do not count those as user clicks and they don't influence CTR.

For different reasons, the mobile phone you send to can appear in another country different to the one you target. Here you can see campaign sent to Australia with lots of numbers from US.

Users may click your link multiple times generating higher CTR than it really is. We count only the first click and filter all the others.

Beware that some platforms don't filter clicks and estimate CTR using all the clicks registered including bots, multiple clicks, etc. This can lead to lower CTR in comparison with other platforms. That's why first we recommend checking if they count clicks properly.

Some Android devices open a preview of the SMS in the phone itself. When this happens the SMS application will open the link in the background to display the page title and description. We detect when that happens and do not count the click in the analytics screen.

Our bot filters can also show you when your signups and sales may not come from real people.

A signup or sale is suspicious when every click on its message was caught by a bot filter. If no real person clicked the link, then a real person probably did not sign up either. The conversion could come from a bot, a fraud source or a broken tracking setup.

Our data shows how big the difference is. Only 0.3% of suspicious signups became a first deposit (FTD). For signups with a real click, the figure was 6.2%.

When you see the alert

A yellow alert shows at the top of the campaign page when both of these are true:

- The campaign has at least 10 signups.

- More than half of those signups are suspicious.

The alert tells you the share of signups that look like bots. For example: "64% of this campaign's signups look like bots (9 of 14)".

View the flagged signups

Click View signups in the alert to see the list of suspicious signups. Each row shows the click evidence we used, which includes the bot filter that caught the click, the IP address, the country and the device (user agent). The list also shows which signups became sales.

1. Check the traffic source that sends the signups or postbacks.

2. Compare the flagged signups with the data in your tracking platform.

3. Do not use these signups to optimize lists, texts or offers until you confirm that they are real.

We do not remove suspicious signups or sales from your statistics. They are still counted, and we only flag them. You decide if they are real. You can close the alert with the × button.