Clicks link in email not matching webpage visits

[Rich_Miller2]

I sent an email with a link to a marketo landing page.

I have written two smartlist:

1) # of leads that clicked the link in the email

2) # of leads that visited the landing page

Appropriate filters for each.

List 1 has 25 records.

List 2 has 3.

Why the difference? If they clicked the link, they had to get to the landing page.

I dug into it and saw (in the activity log for the lead) a lead that clicked on the link in the mail. I could see they clicked a link on the landing page, but not visited the landing page reference.

Does anyone use "visited lading page" for landing page reporting? Or should I just use clicked link as appropriate and assume of they clicked the link, they saw the webpage. I thought maybe it had to do with browser setting, but the numbers are way off.

The landing page performance report seems to be right. It is showing 35 views. 10 more over the number of clicks lick in email could be due to refresh of page, return views, etc. I think this report is working. The issue is tracking to the specific lead level off the landing page "visit".

Thanks for the thoughts.

RM

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

If they clicked the link, they had to get to the landing page

Maybe.

If a human clicked the link, and they had JavaScript enabled (which, indeed, the vast majority of users do) then they got to the LP.

If a machine followed the link, which a growing number of anti-spam/anti-malware/anti-virus scanners do, then no human visited the page, but the click will still be registered.

So keep the machine/human divide in mind.

As far as real humans visiting the page but not registering the Visit Web Page at the Munchkin level -- which would be the case for your one case study where the person clicked a link to leave the LP but did not appear to hit the LP -- this can be because the Munchkin call was cancelled or timed out before registering the hit.  Any trend in how far (geographically) the leads are from your Mkto instance?

[Casey_Grimes]

Much like Sanford, I've found anti-spam/anti-malware software are logging clicks for emails—without even flagging the email as opened, no less. They almost always have the UA Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0), even across companies, so it's got to be some specific scanner.

If anyone knows specifically who/what's using this specific method I'd love to know, if only to adjust mailing reports to be more accurate.

[SanfordWhiteman]

MessageLabs (Symantec).

[Anonymous]

Hi Rich

I met similar issue.

And I found some Chrome versions cancels Munchkin.js visitWebPage.

munchkin.js visitWebPage is canceled, Why?

Sanford and his beaconize() helped me

I recommend you beaconize() strongly.

[Rich_Miller2]

Here is what I ended up doing. As long as we are measuring consistently, we should get the info we need. At least we will be consistently inaccurate! 😉

We are tracking views to the webpage based on the click in the mail driving to that webpage. I also set a filter in the smartlist that the mail was opened based on some of the feeback above.

Thanks all for the help.

RM