Cleaning ESP exports before you trust a click map
The unglamorous hour that decides whether your journey poster tells the truth.
Click-path posters fail quietly when the export still contains bot-like bursts, duplicated pixel fires, and leftover test sends. We budget a full working block for cleanup before any ink hits the journey board.
Strip the rehearsal traffic
Ask your ESP admin for the seed and QA lists used that week. Those addresses click everything. Leave them in and your “most popular” path is a rehearsal artefact.
Collapse mirror domains
Brand.com and brand.co.uk landing twins often share content but appear as separate destinations. Decide up front whether they are one fork or two. Document the choice on the map legend so later quarters stay comparable.
Time-box suspicious spikes
A single minute with hundreds of identical clicks on an obscure footer link deserves a quarantine label. We do not delete without noting it; we draw it as a dashed route so the readout can discuss monitoring rather than creative blame.