Email Click Report discrepancies Marketo vs Google Analytics | Community
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A
Anonymous
December 1, 2016
Question

Email Click Report discrepancies Marketo vs Google Analytics

  • December 1, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 6274 views

We are seeing big discrepancies in our email click-through data in Marketo versus UTM traffic data in Google Analytics.

For example, Marketo reports 535 clicks and Google Analytics reports 115 users clicked through.

There are these discrepancies on all campaigns in September/October.

Has anyone had similar issues?

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2 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
December 1, 2016

Realize that GA is not logging clicks, it's logging JS-enabled pageviews resulting from clicks. Marketo is logging activity on the email links themselves.

The discrepancy is almost surely from anti-spam scanners following your links to check for malicious content.

There have been a number of discussions here about this phenomenon, but there is no all-purpose solution (for very good technical reasons).

A
Anonymous
December 1, 2016

The only other piece of the puzzle here is that this total email referral traffic has gone down by a substantial percentage in Sept/Oct so it seems like something else is going on (there was no adjustment in email frequency/volume to account for this decrease). And a colleague (at same company but different instance of Marketo) that just transitioned from ExactTarget is seeing same issues, a drop in GA email referral by 50%.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
December 1, 2016

(You probably don't need to copy the same reply!)

If what you're noting is GA going down -- both as a percentage and as raw numbers -- while Marketo is stable, then GA may have become more sensitive to certain kinds of JS-enabled automated scanners (and is discarding that traffic from results). 

Just because a machine hit your links doesn't mean that machine wasn't also able to run JS (some of them do in order to perform deep scanning -- they are basically "headless browsers"). 

Emmanuelle_Biss
Emmanuelle_Biss
Level 4
December 1, 2016

Hey Meighan Berberich​,

I agree with what Sanford says. The discrepancy can somewhat be explained by the anti-spam scanners.

Also, in Marketo, you are looking at total clicks, not at the number of unique users who have clicked on your email. So if a person clicks 5 times on your email, you will get 5 clicks in Marketo. From what you say, it looks like you are looking at users in GA (users clicked through).

Try to create a smartlist to see how many members have clicked on your email. This number should come closer to the number of users you get in GA

Emma

A
Anonymous
December 1, 2016

The only other piece of the puzzle here is that this total email referral traffic has gone down by a substantial percentage in Sept/Oct so it seems like something else is going on (there was no adjustment in email frequency/volume to account for this decrease). And a colleague (at same company but different instance of Marketo) that just transitioned from ExactTarget is seeing same issues, a drop in GA email referral by 50%. 

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