Does user spam Filter / Anti-Virus effect link click stats?

Thanks in advance for anyway who can advise on this matter.

Currently, we are using MailChimp, here’s an email from MailChimp Support about this matter:

“Looking in on the campaign report I am seeing a few subscribers that exhibit that larger than normal amount of clicks. For reference I’m seeing that with jake.edward@wardhadaway.com (76), ross.humphries@ibblaw.co.uk (81),caroline.bywater@mills-reeve.com (78), andrew.hipper@mills-reeve.com(78), and chris.wragg@mills-reeve.com (76) within the July 2016 Newsletter campaign. My first thought here is that each of those subscribers is utilizing a spam filter/antivirus software which is clicking each link within an email more than a single time in order to look for “suspicious” activity.
This occurs due to the way we apply click tracking to links in campaigns. Each link within a campaign gets a campaign, subscriber and URL specific tracking link. That has the subscriber “click-through” our sending servers which allows the system to indicate a click has been completed by the subscriber. These strings in the campaign links allow us to assign the behavior to a specific campaign report, specific subscriber and specific URL they are clicking to. There’s no way to only track for physical clicks rather than filtering/antivirus clicks due to the way we record that reporting info.
However, I wanted to make mention that there is reporting statistic which can be useful here. That metric is the “unique” clicks for the campaign. This will only record a click a single time for each subscriber that does click a link in the campaign. That can be viewed on the Reports > *campaign name* > # Clicked > Unique clicks column. For visual reference please see the article here – Enable and View Click Tracking: http://eepurl.com/b2Q-OX#View-Click-Tracking-Reports
Please feel free to get back in touch if we can help out in any way further. Always happy to help in any way we can. Hope you have a great rest of your day.”

So, we’re getting subscribers clicking on links, but according to Mailchimp, what is most likely happening is that the law firms’ antivirus software is clicking the link over and over again to check it isn’t a virus.

What are your thoughts on that? Do you know much about this?

The problem is that, down the line, we would like to start segmenting our subscribers according to what they like to look at. What helps is if they look at the same link more than once – that way we can tell it’s something they’re really interested in and go from there. However, if it is antivirus software and Mailchimp can’t do anything about that to distinguish between actual clicks and antivirus clicks, then our segmenting idea isn’t quite as sure as we would want because the only information we can gather is unique clicks.

Many Thanks,

Jack

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