This is a significant problem and from what I've been told, Marketo will soon be releasing a statement on this. Here are my thoughts on this:
- This is NOT bot related. We're seeing the same 80% decline in click results and while I can't say for sure that we do not have some bots in our database, they certainly are NOT generating 80% of our clicks. We have over 5 years of historical click data in multiple marketing platforms that supports the point that the decline in clicks is completely inaccurate and overstated. So the support suggestion that there are a handful of problematic IP addresses is just wrong, and it's troubling that support is completely out of the loop on what is happening.
- For Marketo customers who are deploying emails on behalf of our customers who are paying us, this is a tremendous problem and we do not have a usable explanation from Marketo. This is really bad.
- What seems most likely is that Marketo is suppressing corporate security software that is preliminary testing emails by clicking on all of the links in an email; I am ok with this, however from what I've been told Marketo is then suppressing ALL subsequent clicks from that company. So for example, if company XYZ scans an email through software for security purposes, determines that the email is safe and then delivers that email to 100 people within that company, and some of those people click the email, those clicks are being suppressed in reporting.
We've been dealing with this for nearly 2 months and it's very disappointing that Marketo has not fixed this and doesn't seem to have a logical understanding of what is happening.
.png)