Anonymous Activity Reports look suspicious: 96 leads and page views for too many companies

[Frank_Elley]

For many days in a row, our daily reports on anonymous website activity show the same companies generating the same number of "Total Leads" and same number of "Page Views". They are all hosting companies that span the globe:

ServerBeach (Los Angeles), 96 leads, 96 page views
Linode (Japan), 96 leads, 96 page views
Hetzner Online (Germany), 96 leads, 96 page views

There are others, but you get the point. Same hosting companies generating the same traffic each day. Can't be a coincidence.

Anyone seen this? Is there an obvious or well known explanation, such as a some sort of monitoring/spidering/spamming bot?

Key concern here: I'm not worried about the traffic per se. But the consistent, continued appearance of these unhelpful and suspicious entries has begun to chip away at the credibility and confidence that the recipients of this report - Sales people looking for prospecting clues - have in their validity. 

Would appreciate any experience you have with this. (I suppose we could try filtering these out, but I want to understand what's up with this before doing so.)

Thanks ....

[Anonymous]

The scenario is very consistent with spambots.

One possibile solution, very quick and simple, is enforcing JavaScript.

Spambots have it disabled to improve performance and make them less trackable.
The vast majority of genuine users have JavaScript  enabled by default.

Please review my suggestions at http://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PhtSAAS

[Frank_Elley]

Thanks ... but it's a different issue. Your fix addresses form submissions. I'm looking at anonymous activity reports. I can always just filter out those specific companies. But the larger question I'm being asked by execs: "Would filtering just be covering up a Marketo bug? It's just too coincidental that the same companies are generating the same activity day in, day out. Before you 'make it go away with some filtering hocus pocus,' prove to me that it's not a symptom of something flawed in Marketo that would cast doubt on all the other stats as well." So I'm looking for an explanation of what it represents. Is it a bug, or can we explain why different companies from around the globe are visiting anonymously the same number of times every day?

[Anonymous]

In my humble opinion that is not a bug at all. I do not want to prove, disprove or start a lenghty debate. It is just unlikely.

I can extend that beyond Marketo as one of my roles as volunteer for a non-profit is maitaining its website. I often find that in Drupal's logs. (Drupal is the leading open source content management system).

The anonymus visits, if not pure spambots, may be web crawlers refreshing the indexed content. That also generates a well defined pattern.

I am available to review the details through a Support Case. That woudl ensure sensitive data is not exposed to the entiire Community. 

[Frank_Elley]

Thanks! I took you up on the offer and just submitted a case (#00208323). If anyone does recognize the pattern and/or the companies, I'd appeciate hearing the explanation.