The Quality Score of an engagement activity assesses and rates the interaction with a piece of content. We can tell whether the content was viewed by an individual or potentially caused by programmatic activity / bot traffic*. The higher the quality score the less likely it is that the activity was performed by a program and the more confidence there is that the activity is from an individual. There are three quality levels:
Quality 1 - data that is most likely programmatic activity / bot traffic*.
Quality 2 - data that is mostly legitimate engagement data, some programmatic bot traffic.
Quality 3 - real engagement from individual readers, chance of programmatic activity is relatively low.
*Programmatic activity / bot traffic may be caused by a number of applications including web crawlers, or spiders, a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing, network and firewall security appliances that have spam filters, malware checkers, and antivirus tools provided by companies like Barracuda and Palo Alto Networks, as well as individual email client settings.
For more information, about why this matters, check out this article from our marketing resource site, Follow Your Buyer.
The below image shows how the different quality scores are displayed on a reader engagement activity.
Can I remove programmatic engagement activity caused by bots?
Technically, no you cannot "remove" the engagement activity caused by a bot.
However, one of the most powerful benefits provided by Templeton is Data Filtering. Templeton provides the ability to filter and limit the data you see through four filtering parameters: General, Demographic, Firmographic, and Contextual.
You can "filter" out the programmatic engagement activity through the use of the Quality Score Contextual Filter (shown in the image below). You can do this permanently by setting your Default Filters or any time when viewing data in Templeton by using the individual Dashboard Filters.
If, for example, you would like to limit the view of your engagement activity to engagements with a Quality Score of 2 or 3, you open the Dashboard or Default Filters, and select "2" and "3" as shown below. When you view the results, the engagements with a Quality Score of 1 will no longer be viewable. To add the Quality 1 engagements back into your data, simply clear the Quality Score Contextual Filter and the engagements will once again be viewable.
