Massively Inflated Clicks March 2026

Could it be bot activity tied to real inboxes? Check these patterns in your data: time-to-click (clicks within seconds of delivery are almost certainly bots/scanners), IP clustering - many clicks from the same IP ranges (Microsoft, AWS, etc.), nearly all recipients clicking = artificial inflation, multiple links clicked instantly

I haven’t seen a widespread, industry-wide spike specifically around mid-March, so I’d be cautious about assuming it’s a systemic issue. 60-80% is too high, even with strong copy + “friendly from,” that’s unusually high for most audiences. So it’s worth double-checking before attributing it purely to performance improvement. Even if you're able to match activities to real people in DB, that doesn't technically rule out the possibility of bot engagements (any click/open engagement by bot/privacy scanner would be logged as click/open activity to the recipient itself in Marketo).

Some things you can check:

• Are clicks happening within seconds/minutes of delivery?
• Are multiple links clicked almost simultaneously?
• Are all links getting clicked equally? Bots often click every link, not just primary CTAs

There wasn’t a known Marketo-wide change, but email security vendors do update their scanning behavior periodically, which can cause sudden shifts like this. It could be a genuine improvement, but with numbers that high, I’d definitely validate patterns before concluding that. Also, consider turning on bot filtering/logging if it isn't already.

We were recently tasked with adjusting our scoring - mainly clicks. After running some early reports, we noticed near 100% clicks of the same links across different emails with the same lists. Checking activity,  we saw that it wasn’t just one link in each email, but ALL links. After going back a few months further, it looks like it’s been happening more and more. This has rendered click scoring useless without some extra touch points that happen after wards (landing pages, downloads, etc.). We’ve come to the conclusion that it almost certainly has to do with increased adoption of email scanning software that clicks every link in an email.