Marketo Bots - workaround?

[devanm60563341]

     Hello,

We use marketo and have noticed that on days we send bigger email blasts, some of our prospects/customers are using a bot to click through the email before it gets to the intended recipient. We are getting THOUSANDS of extra bot hits on our website because of this, and I'm stuck doing a lot of manual reporting of even basic web metrics.

Support has suggested that I go in daily and look and see if the direct hits # has spiked, then go dig in and find the IP and block it, but that's not really a practical workaround for a small web team. I imagine lots of customers are facing this issue - the hits come at regular intervals and all hit the same page (our logo is the top left corner of the email, first click for bots) and it seems like Adobe could be doing a better job of filtering this out proactively instead of sending me in retroactively once the damage to the reports has been done.

Does anyone have a better workaround or suggestions on how to make this more manageable? Thanks!

[mubarakd5726232 · Accepted solution]

some of options ..

1. With Bot rules you can also filter by User Agent string (in addition for IPs) .. so, if you're able to identify a consistency in the UA string of the bots (that differs from normal) you can block this way.

2. Sounds like you already have a segment in place to identify spikes, if not create one and set up an alert, so you get notified if it goes beyond a certain threshold.

3. You may also have this in place too, but create a virtual report suite which you use as your main suite.  As you identify bots/segments you can apply the exclude segments to your virtual report suite, this way you have clean retrospective data