Working with a client recently I noticed something quite interesting about bot detection and the impact on open rates.
If you are using bot detection in logging mode, any email open that is done by a person AFTER also being done by a bot will not be recorded.
The rationale is simple, perfectly reasonable, but still very frustrating.
Marketo records one and only one open per email per lead. Normally this is exactly as it should be. However, if a bot opens the email first and you are in bot detection logging mode, then THIS is the open that gets recorded. If a person subsequently opens the email, then this does not get recorded (it's not the first open after all).
As best I can determine, there isn't a way around this other than to either turn bot detection off OR use bot detection in filtering mode.
My particular use case
We were looking into Click to Open ratios. To counteract the effects of the filtering issue, we performed a calculation on logged 'person' opens vs total delivered to give us a 'person opened %'. We multiplied this % against the number of bot opens to give us the number of bot opens we could reasonably assume (and yes, I know what people say about assuming things) were also subsequently opened by a person. We then added that number to the logged person opens to give us a total person opens.
Clicks
This problem does not exist when looking at email clicks as each click is recorded and is tagged in bot detection logging mode as either bot/not bot. This is much easier to filter out at an analytics level.
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