[Shared Blog]: I Want to Believe, But: Your Email Link Clicks Aren’t Real

Hi Dan,

Another solution that we've tried before is adding a small 1x1 white image pixel into our email templates that links to a landing page. The theory being that a real human will not see the 1x1 pixel, so all of the clicks on that pixel that go through to that landing page are bots.

Then in our smart lists, we add another filter that says "did not visit web page: "enter the bot landing page name" as an additional way to filter out the bot traffic.

Dan this is exactly what we've done since realizing false clicks were such a huge problem, especially when counting them as a response. It cuts out a lot of the headtrash with deceiving email metrics. I'm pretty happy with the results of setting up smart campaigns in that way. Thanks for sharing!

Dan, are you writing this because you've seen an uptick in this behavior recently?  If so, you're not alone!  I'm also looking for a method to split the difference between too much marketing suspend and too much false-positive clicking.  Let me know what you find out!  :-)

Oh, hey, this is here! I tend to only post super-Marketo-related items on the Champions blog, so for more generalized things like this (and to hear from fabulous folks like @Liz Medeiros​ and @Alex Greger​) you should check out demandlab.com/insights.

That said: the usual recommendation is for smaller instances to go ahead and do what Dan mentions--a trigger of "Visited Web Page" along with a filter of "Email Was Delivered" within a certain time period (usually 2-3 weeks) with a Program Status Change of "Clicked" or similar--but I like the idea of putting a wait step on just visiting the web page, waiting, and doing a delivery check for more active or larger instances.

Talk to support. Tell them about this feature*, and see if they can turn it on if it's a real problem for you:

My client turned it on recently and the results have been much more sensible than before.

*just don't ask me what it does exactly and if it actually has any impact on reporting metrics.

Hey All,

I just wanted to chime in with another solution that's been working for us for a while. We, too, noticed a large uptick in the number of false clicks about two years ago. One of the reasons behind this was that when I first started here I worked with IT to have the SPF and DKIM set up properly, which had a positive impact on our delivery (~97% up from ~70%), but because we were able to 'hit' more companies now, we were also encountering more spam filtering software. As machine learning continues to grow and expand, we knew we needed to draw a hard line under how we track our emails.

We now use the "Visited Web Page" trigger, with Querystring Parameter Constraints built in every time. We utilize special UTM parameters (UTM_source, UTM_medium, UTM_campaign, etc.) to delineate visitors to the page who came from the email. It's important to set these Querystring constraints to use "contains" and NOT "equals". This is because the string will not only contain the UTM, but also the user's munchkin code, etc. and you don't want to lose data. See screenshot below for an example.

To make sure that we're not double-processing or double-scoring any lead, we also exclude the email's UTM from the overall web campaign that's tracking the asset on it's own (see screenshot below).

Overall this is a bit easier to track once it's set up, and a huge benefit is that it keeps you from having to rely on long wait steps, which can also push your campaigns further down the campaign queue in priority and can lead to race condition errors.

I hope this was useful!

Thanks,

Abby

wrote this a while ago: Marketers vs email security bots: an emerging war | B2B Lead Nurture

would be nice if Marketo formally addressed this in its backend, or by opening a backchannel to the leading bot security vendors to negotiate whitelisting marketo servers.

I wanted to go ahead and piggyback on this particular thread, as there's a new complexity at play: an anti-spam measure has been updated by at least one company in the past couple of weeks to fully load pages in emails, including with JavaScript. Right now, because the IPs looking at this are Azure-based, it's a straightforward process to remove them by not loading Munchkin on Azure IPs and/or screening those IPs out of Marketo activities, but this sort of development is worth keeping an eye on.

More information is at demandlab.com/insights/blog/want-believe-butyou-cant-coast-anti-spam-measures-year-ago/

So I've read through each comment and am still confused on the current best method to combat false positives.

Is it @Dan Stevens​' approach using the Visited Web Page flow? Is it using utm parameters on every link?

@Sanford Whiteman​ I'm also curious about the method you're testing to track the user clicks vs automated clicks.

A quick update here: as of today, I've picked up some new behavior by a different major antispam provider that may cause further wrinkles in this, especially around user agents (because I'm detecting different things in Marketo and on the server itself. :/) This particular company is using Amazon EC2 instances to check links and is making it to full web page visits. Hoping to have more clarity on this in the next week or so.