If you see activity in your reports coming from your internal use of Act-On or from anti-spam email protection, you may want to ignore these clicks. You can block specific IP addresses from your reports by adding them to a list for Act-On to ignore.

Why you should ignore internal activity

When creating your marketing content in Act-On, you'll need to perform actions that generate activity, including testing an email design, sending a copy of your email to other parties (such as your staff or clients), or previewing landing pages using their public URLs.

By default, these actions are recorded and displayed as activity in your reports. This is not desired data, since it doesn't accurately reflect engagement from your company's contacts. This data only reflects your testing activities.

To present clean data in your reports, it's a good idea to ignore IP addresses used by your marketing team and/or your company.

Why you should ignore anti-spam technologies

When you send an email, the contact's mail server will likely have some anti-spam technology. This technology will scan your email for malicious links before delivering it to the contact's inbox. You may see this in your reports as specific trends, such as a large number of clicks in the minutes just after a message was sent out and/or clicks in the first link of your message (often the "View in browser" link). These clicks count as message opens, and you may see bot activity inflating your open rates.

You should ignore this activity if you rely on open and click data to measure contact engagement and score leads in Act-On.

What happens when you ignore an IP address

When you ignore an IP address in your Act-On account, activity from ignored IP addresses will no longer show in your reports, for all time.

Some additional things to know:

• Activity History and Lead Score will no longer reflect behaviors from ignored IP addresses as of the date they are ignored. Activity history and lead scores cannot be changed retroactively.
• Data Studio reports must use the setting Ignore registered internal IPs for each export's Data Set.

Initial Setup

Step 1: Determine which IPs to ignore

Anti-Spam IPs

By default, Act-On automatically adds the known IP addresses for Barracuda anti-spam filters for all accounts created after May 2017. However, these are not the only IPs associated with anti-spam software. You may want to identify and ignore additional IP for additional anti-spam security systems.

Internal Company IPs

During your account setup, ask your IT team to provide the public IP ranges for your company's network. They should provide this as an IPv4 address or range. CIDR notation should be converted to IPv4 before entering the address in your Act-On settings. Your IT specialist will know what this means.

Step 2: Ignore the IP addresses in Act-On

Once you have the IP addresses you want to ignore, you need to add them to your account:

1. Go to Settings > Other Settings > Internal IP Addresses
2. Enter the IP addresses and/or ranges that you want to ignore
3. Click Save
   
   You can enter IP addresses in three different formats:

   • A single IP address. Example: 198.51.100.10
   • A range between two IP addresses. Example: 203.0.113.0-203.0.113.254
   • A range in the last octet of an IP address block. Example: 233.252.0.0-255

Making Changes

You can always come back to this page to add or remove IP addresses. However, there are some important things to know when you do this:

• Changes are retroactive for reports, but they are not retroactive for a contact's activity history (and therefore lead score).
• Making changes to your ignored IP settings may result in slow performance while your changes are processed.
• If you have added new IPs associated with high volume activity (such as from anti-spam software), you may see a significant change in your clickthrough and open rates as they stop reflecting bot activity.

FAQs

Why do I still see activity from ignored IPs in Data Studio?

To exclude activity from your ignored IPs, Data Studio reports need to use the Ignore registered internal IPs setting for each export's Data Set.

Why do I still see activity in my contact's activity history and lead score?

When you add an IP to ignore after the activity has been recorded, Act-On will ignore that activity moving forward. This will not impact existing activity or lead scores.

Changes are retroactive for all reports, including Data Studio, however, not for a contact's activity history.