ProFundCom Product & Service Notification 8th February 2020
Published: 8 February, 2020
Enhanced Tracking Algorithm Section: Analytics and Reporting Description:
More and more email servers and email clients are using third party servers to download images and open links within emails before the email gets to the recipient. Sometimes this means that information is received by ProFundCom that is the same as if the recipient had opened the email or link, when actually it was not the recipient but a third party. So to ProFundCom it looks like there has been an engagement when actually the interaction was coming from somewhere else rather than the recipient themselves. This can result in engagements being recorded by ProFundCom that did not actually come from a recipient interaction.
In order to minimise this effect, ProFundCom takes a number of steps to identify and remove suspicious engagements.
ProFundCom identifies servers that are the source of misleading engagements in 3 ways:
Using, lists of IP Addresses that are known to be data centers hosting software that causes misleading engagements
Identifying suspicious engagement patterns that are unlikely to be the result of real recipient engagement
Serving hidden links that would only be clicked on by a software application rather than a human recipient
ProFundCom then excludes interactions from the identified servers by:
Logging future interactions from these IP addresses in a separate “quarantine” store rather than the “real” engagement store
Moving historical records from these IP addresses for the previous 2 days from the “real” engagements store to a “quarantine” engagements store
As IP Addresses can be reassigned they are removed from the quarantine list after 2 months. It is possible, if required, to reinstate interactions from the “quarantine” store, or to apply cleaning methods to older historical data.
