Bot Proximity Pattern Time Setting?

[chris2929]

Hi Everyone,

I'm wondering what duration (seconds) you're using for this feature? Getting bot clicks out of our reporting is a priority right now and I'm unsure what the best practice with respect to duration between activities is.

Thank you!

Chris

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Well, it depends on how conservative/liberal you want to be while logging your email engagements. With the default 0 seconds, you’d be in the liberal end, whereas with the 3 seconds, you’d be on the most conservative end for categorizing and filtering bot activities. 

• As you increase the value from 0 seconds to 3 seconds number of activities that are identified as bots will increase, i.e., your bot filtering becomes more strict, and would classify more activities as bots.
• If you activate the bot activity into filter mode and increase the time difference can affect your email engagement rate.

You can check how spaced email click activities are currently- if you have a lot of activities spaced within a 1-3 seconds range then there is a potential chance that you have significant bot activities being logged and considered as genuine activities by the proximity pattern matching, and if you increase the duration between activities settings, you’ll see a significant drop in the genuine non-bot email engagements in your reports.

[uditmathur]

Adding to Darshil_Shah1 comment, you can also add these IP's to your block list. They are identified by Marketo as responsible for generating millions of fake engagements, as such engagement received from any of the following IPs is automatically filtered out and not added to your Marketo Engage Instance. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Engagements received from any of the following IPs identified by Marketo (i.e., the ones that are listed on the page you linked above) are automatically filtered out and not added to Marketo in the first place, so there is no need to filter out/block list at the end user level separately.

[chris2929]

Thanks Darshil,

Is there a way to see how many activities are occurring spaced in the 1-3 second range via a report of some kind? It would be nice to see that without implementing a more conservative approach.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, you can always export activities via the bulk extract API and analyze them to find the average duration between the activities. The email performance and click reports show the first and last activity datetime stamps,  not the actual dates of the respective activities.