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Ali_Jiwani
Level 2
February 21, 2025
Solved

Block or Mark certain IPs as Bots

  • February 21, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 1300 views

We use Marketo to run email campaigns and most of our users are enterprise users. 

Most of them have enterprise level systems like barracuda.com, microsoft defender etc.

 

Now whenever these spam detection tools go in and check for spam/malicious links we get the following problems

1. Click-through-rate goes up even when there are not actual clicks.

2. Open-rates goes up even when there are not actual opens.

 

Is it possible we add certain IP's we've identified during the audit to exclude from CTR/Opens? If so we'd like to keep updating this list regularly as well.

Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

You don’t have control over the IP list, no.

 

I assume you have both bot filtering settings enabled in Admin?

3 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
Level 10
February 21, 2025

You don’t have control over the IP list, no.

 

I assume you have both bot filtering settings enabled in Admin?

Darshil_Shah1
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
February 22, 2025

@ali_jiwani, if you don't already know about Marketo's email bot filtering feature, check this out.

 

To give some background, Marketo's Email Bot Filtering Activity feature helps eliminate false engagement metrics caused by bots/privacy scanners. There are 2 methods used to filter email open or email click activities:

 

  1. Match with IAB bot list: Activities that match with the list UA/IPs from IAB will be marked as bots
  2. Proximity pattern: When 2 or more activities happen simultaneously, i.e., under 0 seconds (duration between activities is customizable), they are also identified as bots. This pattern should identify activities generated by the link scanners.

Marketo also maintains a list of IPs responsible for generating fake engagements, and engagements received from any of these IPs are automatically filtered out.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 27, 2025

@ali_jiwani please return to your thread and check responses.

Ali_Jiwani
Level 2
March 4, 2025

Honestly IAB and Proximity pattern don't work for us as with the # of clicks we get these get missed. Example, we usually get upto 5 clicks in the initial 2mins of the email send and upon checking all those are bot/spam checking activity. None are human and it is upto 70-80% of our audience.  

 

We can introduce something on our end for detection but i was hoping to get it done on Marketo end to have a better CTR and Open ratio.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
March 5, 2025

Note you didn’t mention using the Bot Filtering options at all before. So it wasn’t clear where you were coming from. What is your Proximity Pattern setting? Did you test various time ranges?