'Clicks link in email' activity not accurate

[James_Glavin]

Our sales team have been experiencing a strange patter of alerts to let them know that someone has clicked in an email.   Yesterday, one of our sales reps all of a sudden received 40+ alerts all at once to tell him his contacts had clicked a link in an email. The strange thing is that the email had gone out several days previously, so it was *extremely* unlikely so many of his contacts had clicked in the email at that very moment. Looking at the Marketo activity logs for these contacts, it shows a strange pattern - a number of his leads are showing that they all clicked an email four times, round about the same time. 

I logged this issue with Marketo Support, and their response is that this was probably caused by email security software testing the links, which Marketo sees as a genuine click. Apparently there's nothing we/Marketo can do to avoid this. The thing is, it seems like this has only become a problem for us in the past few weeks, so it feels like this is a new issue, although Marketo insists there's nothing wrong with the way we have things set up.

Has anyone experienced this issue? Does is seem to have worsened lately? What methods do you use to prevent these artificial clicks from being captured and inflating lead score. How do you make sure Interesting Moments are only created for genuine clicks?

Thanks in advance,

James 

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, do a search here for that. Someone had a workaround. Won't be perfect though.

[James_Glavin]

I found this thread, which might be the one you're thinking about, Josh. Posting it here for anyone else looking for it:

Misreporting Email Clicks - Hitting Email Probes

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

There actually is something you can do about this: and that's include a "visited web page" filter (with a "date of activity" contraint of "in time frame" = Today) along with the "clicks link in email" trigger.  Check out the detail behind this in this thread: Re: Spam filters registering clicks?

[Andy_Penkalski]

I've been trouble-shooting this issue for our company today when I found your suggested solution. I'm wondering if "Opened email" would work instead of the "Visited web page" filter.

Sifting through our afflicted prospects, I've noticed a couple who have displayed the "visited web page" while none have displayed "Opened email". I know the linked thread ​above addresses how not all of these spam filters carry out tasks identically. In our company's situation I'm seeing the occasional "visited web page" appear amidst our bad data points, but I'm never seeing "Opened email" appear in connection to any of these phantom link clicks.

Any thoughts about this as a better or worse solution?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Opened Email only is logged if the person (or non-human/bot) downloads images.  I don't see how that could do anything but confuse matters, since opens are not a positively reliable metric. 

[Andy_Penkalski]

Thanks, I guess I didn't fully understand how marketo's "opened email" filter is defined.

[Anonymous]

Hi James - we are experiencing the exact same thing. Noticed it began recently as well - in the past month - and got the same response from Support.