Bot clicks triggering web visits - What to score on instead?

[stephdemandgen]

My organization wants to score leads based on web activity, but after turning on our updated scoring, I realized that bot clicks are triggering web page visits. Looking for suggestions on how to "fix" this tracking (if possible) or ideas for other proxy metrics to score one. I have enabled and filtered bot activity in "Match with IAB List and "Match with Proximity Pattern" already.

We've stopped looking at click data because after turning on those filters, we were still get a high volume of illegitimate clicks, but if we need to exclude web page visits from our scoring, then we'd only have open emails and form fills. I'm hoping there's a better way! Thanks in advance!

 

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Are these activities immediately after the email delivery and are you seeing a lot of such activities (i.e., multiple clicks and web visits in a very short span of time) or is this an exceptional one-off case? Also, do the click activities in the snapshot have the Is Bot Activity parameter set to True? Personally, if it's a long email with multiple CTAs that interests me, I have clicked 2-3 links simultaneously to spend time reading the pages instead of returning to the email after viewing each page. Not saying this cannot be bot activities, but it's plausible that these could be from a genuine person as well (just a thought). As a side note, similar to email clicks, open activities could also originate from bots.

[stephdemandgen]

No, the click/web visits were around 25 minutes after the email delivery and the Is Bot Activity is set to False. So, like you suggested, this may be genuine/legitimate click/web visit activity. (I'll keep that in mind if I see this again).

However, I don't see any Activity Type that says the person Opened the email. Why's that? 

[Darshil_Shah1]

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However, I don't see any Activity Type that says the person Opened the email. Why's that? 

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Marketo logs the Open Email activity when the recipient's mail client sends a request for loading a transparent tracking pixel added to the tracked Marketo emails. In case the email client doesn't send a request to Marketo to fetch the tracking pixel, which would happen in case images are blocked from loading, then Marketo would never know whether a person opened email or not. To combat this, Marketo's email performance report has a built-in logic that counts emails as Delivered and Opened, in case the email record shows Clicked Email or Unsubscribed. However, this is limited to the email performance report and activities aren't backfilled in the person's activity log, and hence aren't reflected in the smart lists either.

[Christiane_Rode]

When you're looking at either the click or web page activities can you tell if it's coming from the same device/location/IP when you expand the detail? Just thinking that, depending on what your email is about, these engagements could be the result of a forward, as all of those clicks would be attributed back to the Marketo record associated with the email, but the clicks would be coming from different things and different locations, as it's many people clicking at the same time.

[stephdemandgen]

There is one click/web page visit that is from a different IP Address. That's an interesting scenario that's never crossed my mind. Is there any way to see if the email has indeed been forwarded?