False positive Email delivered?

[Jeremy_Nunez]

Hi all,

Has anyone encountered a Marketo where an email is getting marked as sent/delivered when in fact it has bounced? We had a situation where someone received an email, clicked on the email and it changed her score within our scoring system, according to Marketo, but it turns out that the email address hasn't been in use for years when we contacted the company.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you never received an out-of-band bounce in the activity log, then it didn't "bounce."  Most likely a mail scanner checked the links (resulting in a spurious Click Link) and then the email went to a catch-all mailbox for obsolete addresses.

[Jeremy_Nunez]

Thank you Sanford, this makes a lot of sense. I figured that just because the email wasn't in use doesn't mean that it automatically means it should bounce.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, Servers are not required to tell you anything about the Delivery.

[Anonymous]

I saw this happening as well--an unusually large number of clicks on an email, but no corresponding visit to the landing page.  Upon resarch, I came across this article, which suggests that its specifically Baracuda's email security will generate a false click on every link in an email.

Barracuda clicking all links in emails - Word to the Wise

If you want to be sure that a click on an email is legitimate (assuming the link is to a landing page), use a combination filter--clicked on link in email AND visited the corresponding web page. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's not just Barracuda. This functionality is standard in enterprise mail protection now, and there are many discussions on the Community about it.

Using Clicked Link + Visit Web Page doesn't offer a full solution -- not only because it doesn't apply to offsite and binary links but because there's no reason to believe, without additional constraints, that the CL was not automated (and the VWP was unrelated). You need to also check that Referrer matches your tracking domain, that mkt_tok exists in the URL, or (preferred) that UTM tags match a given campaign. Still, there will be false positives that remain.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Is there anything Marketo can do on their end to prevent these false positives from being recorded?  I believe you wrote about this somewhere, Sandy. And until that happens, what are the best combination filters (when used with CL trigger) to achieve the most accurate activity/results?  Would love to see some specific screenshots of actual smart lists.

[Jeremy_Nunez]

Unfortunately not all of our content is gated so we cannot use this method but I will keep this in mind for our gated content. Thank you.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You don't have to gate per se, Jeremy.  Since using direct download links in itself causes you to lose tracking overall, you can use a redirector page instead of direct links, so you will get a Visit Web Page (the page redirects automatically, so there's no real gate).