SOLVED
Hi Gergana,
It sounds like we are both experiencing the same issue in the B2B space, although we did not add the "Is bot activity" constraint to our smart list and did not keep the bot log.
Similar to you, we found that the email performance report did not provide an accurate number as it included bot activity. So, we are using the smart campaign to help us pull the list of people who clicked on a certain link, and on top of that, we used the Visited web page smart campaign just to ensure the click is genuine.
Please note that if you are using a trigger smart campaign like the one below, sometimes Marketo doesn't trigger through the audience even though they have visited web page activity on their Activity log. Therefore, I often pressure test with the filtered smart campaign after 1 day or 2 of sending the email.
The visited page smart campaign includes: Visited page with "Link" and "member of Email Sent or click" smart campaign:
Our process seems pretty manual when it comes to reporting accurate email engagement. If anyone experiences a similar issue to Gergana and me, I would love to hear about it. Thank you!
Thanks for all the insightful suggestions so far 🙂
@KarinaVidal, I find the honeypot link in an email to be an interesting approach. However, I'm concerned it might be problematic. From what I recall, using the same color for links and the background can trigger anti-spam algorithms in various email clients, which makes it a bit risky. I should look into this further to confirm, even though these algorithms are often a black box.
Another challenge with this method is that it might exclude legitimate clicks. For instance, if there’s a spike in clicks right after sending, including on the "honeypot" link, and then a contact opens the email two hours later and clicks a link for real, this contact would be excluded from my smart list if I use the "honeypot" click as a filter. It would be useful to have a constraint like "XX seconds duration between clicks," similar to the bot activity filter in admin. This would permit us do better troubleshooting.
For sure the honeypot is a great solution for forms, but in emails, it's a little bit more complicated, I think.
Regarding the second approach, there are a few points to consider:
- Creating a smart list with "link is any" and the constraint "min number of times" = 2 will result in various situations:
- Contacts with 1 bot activity and 1+ real click(s)
- Contacts with 2+ real clicks
However, this approach will exclude all contacts (without any email security system in place that clicks all the links in a mail) that have in the log only one single real click.
Depending on our goals, this method could be useful for generating a list of potential bot clicks for manual review. But if we need it for reporting purposes, the situation becomes more complicated. 🙂
I agree that logically a bot clicks a link only once, but upon examining bot activities in our instance, I found that this is not always the case. Here is a screenshot of a contact showing bot clicks, with the highlighted rows indicating clicks on the same link. Although you can't see the details from the screenshot, I assure you it's the same link, and it appears only once in the email. Strangely, the "higher" one has "Is bot activity" set to False, while the "lower" one has "Is bot activity" set to True.
Looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts on this and if anyone else, besides me and @tcthanawan, has experienced similar issues.
I agree with @KarinaVidal regarding the question of the week. The answer is B) Nurture Streams
Personally, I prefer Marketo's Engagement Programs over the "visual" journeys offered by other marketing automation tools as the Engagement Programs provide extensive flexibility with nurture streams and allow for the inclusion of smart campaigns instead of just simple emails, enabling more complex logic when needed.
Even though the Engagement Programs are my favorite, I find it very challenging to explain their logic to new team members. Most people new to Marketo are accustomed to the visual representation of a journey of other MA tools.
Regarding the Email Deliverability, if you meen the Deliberability Tools "add-on" it's a very interesting feature. Please note that this is a paid add-on (I think for all the Marketo packages). Here is some documentation.
The Email Deliverability tool in Marketo offers real-time tracking of email delivery and inbox placement, providing insights into email performance and deliverability issues. It also includes features for spam diagnostics and reputation monitoring, helping to optimize email campaigns and ensure they reach the intended audience. To utilize it, you have to download a "seed list" from the tool and import it into your Marketo instance. Include this seed list in your email campaigns, and you'll gain access to valuable deliverability data.
Additionally, it has a feature that allows you to create email previews, which is very useful when creating a new email template. This feature lets you test the email with the majority of email clients and on desktop vs. mobile, similar to Litmus.
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