Email can identify bot behavior to be excluded from email performance metrics

[Anonymous]

Some email systems will automatically click on all links in an email before delivering the email to the intended user, and the email behavior is artificially inflated and incorrectly reported. It would be great to be able to identify bot behavior to exclude from email metrics and scoring that is based on email behavior.

For example, an email is sent to a recipient that has a dozen links in it. The recipient's email system will click on every link before delivering the email and the email metrics show the user as having multiple email clicks, when in fact they had none.

[Anonymous]

I agree, I have internal alerts sent based on a particular link within an email and I can tell immediately when a bot is at work, but my sales people cannot because they do not receive all the alerts, only the ones that they own. Identifying and suppressing the bot activity would help immensely!

[Anjani_Pandey]

Remove Bot clicks and open from Email performance report.

Hi, I found that Email performance report includes the bot clicks and opens and that gives a wrong report. This kind of report is not good for reporting purpose.

To find out if the click and open was done by bot I studied the activity log of the leads and found that the activity was like this:

Send email-->Email click-->Email delivered.

Send email-->Email open-->Email delivered

This dot click and open happens due to the email checkers on the recipient email server. 

The real click done by lead has activity log in this way:

Send email--->Email delivered--->Email click or Email open--->visist webpage

I wold like to know what Marketo is doing to over come this?

I would suggest marketo to create a Algorithm that create email performance report  by tracking the leads activity log in the above mentioned way.

Send email--->Email delivered--->Email click or Email open-->Visit webpage.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not so. Your description only accounts for a subset of mail scanners.

The more advanced scanners are not detected with this method. That’s the whole idea, the pattern is identical to a human interaction (otherwise the malicious person would simply take advantage of the predictable pattern).

[Elise_Eidsness2]

Several Marketo users are experiencing false email clicks activity due to a link scanner on the recipients' email server. The link scanner is clicking links in the email to make sure it is safe before the email is delivered to the inbox. In Marketo today, we are able to adjust our scoring rules and smart list/campaign rules for these 'false clicks'. But we are not able to adjust the standard Marketo email reports to remove these false clicks.  My recommendation is for Marketo to adjust their "link click" criteria in their standard reports to remove these false email clicks from the data that is displaying in their reports. 

To read more on the false clicks - read this post:

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Email-was-clicked-before-it-was-delivered-It-s-a-l...