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December 11, 2015
Question

Report on clicks dramatically increased

  • December 11, 2015
  • 11 replies
  • 3381 views

This week we noticed a tremendous increase in our click-thru-rates but we have changed anything in our marketing to cause such an increase.  Has anybody else noticed it?  We're seeing 3-4 times as many people clicking in our emails than we normally do. I'm wondering if Marketo changed something in the way it's tracking links?

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11 replies

December 11, 2015

There was an update to the Email Editor in the last week which includes new automatic tagging when designing new emails.  I don;t think that this should affect click throughs however.

Justin_Cooperm2
Level 10
December 12, 2015

That wouldn't cause such a drastic increase. All that changed was that if you have a tracked link in the HTML side of the email, it is now automatically tracked in the TEXT version. I highly doubt that would cause this type of increase.

Kenny_Elkington
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
December 11, 2015

I guess the obvious question here is did you increase your send volume?  Are there any differences between emails pre and post, like certain common links having "mktNoTrack" or something?

December 14, 2015

Nope - no change in the send volume or the way we're tracking links in emails. 

December 14, 2015

We ended up having the same problem a while back. We noticed that a handful of leads were clicking on every email and every link in the email but never opened the email. It ended up being a anti-spam software on the users side, and it cause an influx on our numbers.  I would just check a couple of your leads that clicked through and see if they clicked every link and opened the email.

December 16, 2015

We code our links with Google Analytics.  We just sent out an email about 15 minutes ago, and Marketo is telling me it already has 320 clicks! But GA is telling us 34, which is way closer to what we'd expect. So I think this uptick is due to a change on Marketo's side because we have not done anything differently on our end. 

January 21, 2016

I ran a couple spot checks and it appears Marketo is recording clicks before the email is ever sent. Even when the lead hasn't opened the email! What is going on here?!?!

Steven_Vanderb3
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
January 21, 2016

This could still be a server's anti-spam software checking links in emails to make sure they are safe before returning a 250 OK response to us to denote the message was accepted/delivered.  I suppose theoretically you could also see a click before a bounce if their software checked the link, decided it didn't like it, and then bounced it back to us.

May 8, 2017

Hi @Steven Vanderberg,

Has Marketo taken any steps to remove these false clicks from the activity? Since you can see that they're clicking before delivery, could Marketo filter those out so that our out-of-box reports are accurate and our triggers don't have to be filtered by "visits page"?

Building custom triggers and filtered reports is not sustainable. We would really like to just use the email reports that marketo produces, but the clicks are sometimes inflated by hundreds.

Thanks!

Venus_Wills
Level 3
January 26, 2016

Hi Rebecca, I have the same thing happening to a campaign I sent out today - the click was recorded before the email was delivered. Additionally, I'm not seeing a "visit webpage" activity after the link was clicked (and there should be). I'm going to use that as a filter in lead scoring, but just the fact that all these spam filter bot clicks are factoring into the overall email performance is going to skew things a bit.

Here's a more detailed explanation of the whole spam filter registering email clicks ordeal: Spam filters registering clicks?