Pardot is filtering out bot clicks, why won't Marketo?

[Swapna_G]

Pardot recently announced they are putting several things in place to get rid of bot clicks. One of the simplest ones being IP-based filtering. We have asked Marketo if they could forward the IP address with click data so we could do something about it. Marketo already has this information. Why can't they filter clicks based on IP addresses that many of these security appliances publicise?

Rejecting clicks before the email was even delivered, would be helpful too.

There are some obvious patterns Marketo to look for - like clicks on every single link or multiple links in a very short timespan.

Or clicks that didn't result in a web pageview. We don't have a simple mechanism to link the two, since Marketo doesn't send the clickId to the web pageview. But Marketo has that info.

This is becoming a big problem, since we can't do any lead nurturing or other campaigns due to bots clicking.

Thanks.

Swapna

[Brent_M]

No, most of them only click the top link in our emails which happens to be a small company log. The 45, 48, and 68 clicks are from our social links in the footer. So there are a few that click every link.

[John_Horton]

I still haven't seen an adequate response from Marketo about why Pardot is actively addressing this but Marketo is not. That's not acceptable. A "best-in-class" marketing automation platform should be trying to fix this instead of having customers rely on a bunch of end-user workarounds. 

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Hi John,

Did you see some of my comments above? Do you oppose our point-of-view to not implement anything that does not truly work? 

I actually just had a meeting this week with a large team of data scientists that we now get to benefit from as part of Adobe. But, this issue is not simple and Pardot is not "solving" this issue. We are members of many email deliverability consortiums and have even engaged with the email security vendors themselves. 

Kiersti Esparza‌ - any data points to share here to add some color for our customer base?

Justin

[John_Horton]

There are documented workarounds in this community that end users themselves have implemented to get much more accurate reporting on email clicks. Why can't those be incorporated into the platform itself? Why should the end users have to do these workarounds themselves just to get accurate email click tracking? Why does Marketo's analytics even bother reporting the email click-thru rate anymore since it's wildly inaccurate? It seems like Marketo's position is "we'd rather do nothing because it's complicated and there's no one thing that will give completely accurate click tracking". I would take mostly accurate tracking or even somewhat accurate tracking over ridiculously inaccurate tracking. I know your claim is that Pardot's fix doesn't fix a lot of issues. But at least it seems like they're doing SOMETHING to improve the situation. 

[Swapna_G]

Justin, Glad to know you guys are at least considering options and it's not falling on deaf ears. But I am surprised that the outcome of those discussions is "let's do nothing" rather than "let's fix at least some of what we can address".

[John_Horton]

Yes, this. Sitting around and having discussions with email deliverability consortiums and email security vendors is great but doesn't actually do anything to help us. Fix some of it even if you can't fix all of it. Put the end-user workarounds INTO the product. 

[Swapna_G]

Just came across this article and couldn't help but posting here - 

https://invadosolutions.com/marketing-automation-news/pardot-feature-ignore-bots-clicking-email-link...  

I was hopeful this channel is something, Marketo product team would take into consideration, for input on new feature enhancements....why wouldn't you want to stay competitive on a critical front that impacts the usability of the system for all of your clients?

I would really like to hear from the product team if anything is being done about this issue. Thanks.

Swapna

[SanfordWhiteman]

A claim to be able to do something isn't the same as actually doing it. 1000% more so in enterprise software.

[Brent_M]

Sanford, so what is it you think they are doing? I'm not disagreeing with you, but I doubt a company as big as Pardot is just making up a warning about click rates shrinking, bots being filtered, etc. I assume they won't' completely fix the problem but it sounds like they are putting at least some type of fix.