Block or Mark certain IPs as Bots

[Ali_Jiwani]

We use Marketo to run email campaigns and most of our users are enterprise users. 

Most of them have enterprise level systems like barracuda.com, microsoft defender etc.

Now whenever these spam detection tools go in and check for spam/malicious links we get the following problems

1. Click-through-rate goes up even when there are not actual clicks.

2. Open-rates goes up even when there are not actual opens.

Is it possible we add certain IP's we've identified during the audit to exclude from CTR/Opens? If so we'd like to keep updating this list regularly as well.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You don’t have control over the IP list, no.

I assume you have both bot filtering settings enabled in Admin?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

@Ali_Jiwani, if you don't already know about Marketo's email bot filtering feature, check this out.

To give some background, Marketo's Email Bot Filtering Activity feature helps eliminate false engagement metrics caused by bots/privacy scanners. There are 2 methods used to filter email open or email click activities:

1. Match with IAB bot list: Activities that match with the list UA/IPs from IAB will be marked as bots
2. Proximity pattern: When 2 or more activities happen simultaneously, i.e., under 0 seconds (duration between activities is customizable), they are also identified as bots. This pattern should identify activities generated by the link scanners.

Marketo also maintains a list of IPs responsible for generating fake engagements, and engagements received from any of these IPs are automatically filtered out.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Ali_Jiwani please return to your thread and check responses.

[Ali_Jiwani]

Honestly IAB and Proximity pattern don't work for us as with the # of clicks we get these get missed. Example, we usually get upto 5 clicks in the initial 2mins of the email send and upon checking all those are bot/spam checking activity. None are human and it is upto 70-80% of our audience.  

We can introduce something on our end for detection but i was hoping to get it done on Marketo end to have a better CTR and Open ratio.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Note you didn’t mention using the Bot Filtering options at all before. So it wasn’t clear where you were coming from. What is your Proximity Pattern setting? Did you test various time ranges?