Update to Filtering bot activity [Jan 2024]

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Hello Nation,

To fight the bot activity in the last two years we have launched two identification methods for email bots (Please check the links below for more details):

• Identification based on Proximity Pattern
• Identification based on the IAB list

Proximity Pattern identifies activities as bot activities based on behavior i.e. if multiple activities from an email asset are sent to a specific lead happening at almost the same time i.e. <1sec. In the Jan release of 2024, a new enhancement to the Proximity Pattern is launched to further improve the bot activity detection.  

Now you can set the time difference that should be considered for identifying the activities that happened close to each other as bot activities.

Important Notes:

• Default value for this time difference is set to 0 seconds i.e only activities that happen in exact same second are identified as bots
• You can only set a time difference value as high as 3 seconds
• As you increase the value from 0 seconds to 3 seconds number of activities that are identified as bots will increase 
• If you activate the bot activity into filter mode and increase the time difference can affect your email engagement rate 

Related links:

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-blogs/update-to-filtering-email-bot-activity-proximity-pattern...

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/filtering-email-bot-activity-september-2022-releas...

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-blogs/filtering-email-bot-activity-feature-faqs/bc-p/328547

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-blogs/filtering-email-bot-activity-feature-v2/ba-p/322774

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-documents/filtering-email-bot-activity-feature-latest-release/...

[chris2929]

Hi Sreekanth,

Do you have a recommendation for the number of seconds? We're currently using 0 but I'm unsure if you have a best practice in mind.

Chris

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

@chris2929 unfortunately there is no one size fits all. The best would be to increase from 0 to 3 seconds gradually. 

[RichFrenchOntra]

Hello Sreekanth,

I spoke with several folks at the Adobe Summit about a new bot trend we're seeing.  One of the professional services team members found this post for me and suggested that I post it here.  After an email is sent, we get the expected click activity, which is now accompanied by page visit activity.  So there will be an opened email, multiple clicks, and multiple page visits, all in the same minute.  We see this activity for everyone at an organization who received the email.  Is there any way to identify these page visits as bot clicks?  We're going to set up a filter for multiple page visits within one minute, but that presents the risk of filtering out actual human activity.   Any guidance you can provide would be appreciated.

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Hello @RichFrenchOntra ,

Unfortunately, current bot filtering is only for email activities, and that to activities happening < 3 seconds. One way could be like you mentioned multiple page visits in the same minute and top of it you can add filter based on specific pages too like if link click is on CTA and footer links at the same time