Blind Submit Forms in Marketo

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sure, that will definitely eliminate false positives... but if you generate a bunch of unsolicited confirmations that itself isn't great for your rep.

[Pavel_Plachky]

Interesting, I was not aware of such email scanners. That would mean the email click-through rates we are seeing are higher than actual clicks by the people we are targeting. So the options are either to have false positives or to require the user to submit a form or at least click on a button (with a known visitor form) to confirm.

I would hope that Marketo could discard all the clicks from an email scanner with a rule that if there is a burst of clicks on all the links at the same time, including the CTA and unsubscribe links, not to mention all the social icons, such clicks are not to be counted or recorded.

[SanfordWhiteman]

...that if there is a burst of clicks on all the links at the same time, including the CTA and unsubscribe links...

Supposedly such heuristics are under development.

[Dan_Stevens_]

When you have some time, head over to this thread for more info:

Spam filters registering clicks?

We now use some additional tactics to weed out those scanners - specifically when the CTA includes a visit to landing page/direct download of PDF.  In addition to the "Clicks email" trigger:

NOTE: for direct links to PDFs, we use Sanford's proven and effective method here: http://blog.teknkl.com/stop-using-direct-download-links-unless-you-like-losing-tracking/

And then here is where we add some extra filtering:

• We include a 15 minute wait step since we've seen delays in writing the "visits web page" activity back to the lead record in Marketo
• We then include a choice of "visited web page" to ensure the user that clicked also visited the landing page (or viewed the PDF file)
• Another small wait step just to ensure program status was properly defined
• And then if the lead didn't receive the appropriate program status, we remove them from the flow.  Otherwise, they would proceed with all of the other flow steps around attribution (last touch channel, program, date, programID); sending campaign alerts (if necessary), etc.

Obviously this won't fix the standard/basic email reporting in Marketo (e.g., email performance, email insights), but it will help at the program membership/success level.