Email Bots Logging Web Activity - HELP

Adele_Miller
Level 5 - Champion Alumni

Hi Champs!

I am hoping someone can help me as I am on the verge of screaming at this issue

We have an issue with email bots / spam checkers clicking every single link on some of our emails before delivering them to the real recipients inbox.

We used to filter these out by no web activity being logged as the bots couldn't log that but recently we have noted they can now log activity against each lead and Support have confirmed this....GRRR!!

We use Sales Insight so this is giving a lot of false positives to sales to follow up on and we want to work out a way to filter this out.

Anyone else having this issue and have some fun ways to resolve it please??

23 REPLIES 23
Adele_Miller
Level 5 - Champion Alumni

Hi Sarah! As the emails being sent have Marketo tracked links, the bot is clicking all links before sending to the real recipient and Marketo sees that as activity from the lead as this is how the bot is intended to work.
The bot in question sits on the recipients mailbox and clicks every link to ensure the email is safe before sending it through to the real inbox, so the leads are known to the system. We don't mark them as responded or anything off the click, but it shows in MSI on web activity and also the MSI email tab as clicked if it was a sales sent email. Really annoying false positives!

Mark_Farnell
Level 5

We haven't fully solved the issue, but we have changed our process to try and mitigate it.  Previously we scored for "email click" and for known leads just pointed them to the hosted content on our nurture emails - that was driving a lot of false positives, so now we only score on a program conversion, which in the case of email nurture means we also now put a form in front of the content to measure a real conversion.  It's by no means ideal, but pre-fill helps and it does mean we don't create a lot of false positives, which was creating a larger issue for us.

Adele_Miller
Level 5 - Champion Alumni

Morning Mark,

Thank you for your answer - this is what we also have in place to ensure we are not marking people as converted on a click.
However we are trying to find a way to stop this so called 'web activity' showing up in our MSI Tabs as it is confusing Sales - same with the clicks really. Can you think of anything there?I am struggling as it isn't something we have an option of filtering.

Thanks!