Difference between Clicked link and the Web Page Activity?

[Anonymous]

I have a scenario where I have hundreds of people showing as having clicked a specific link in an email. However, the landing page web page activity report only gives less than 100 people known to have gone to that landing page. Which is true? The smart list of people who are shown to have clicked the link or the web activity report? It's a huge difference and I want to be able to get an accurate read of who has gone to the landing page.

Thank you,

Anita

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Hi,

probably the most accurate answer is that none are true. Clicks and visit website can be generated by bots (spam filters) - they can click all links, just one and/or visit websites as well. The web page visit report can then be furthermore skewed by recipients' cookie settings - if they block the cookies, Marketo can not record the website visit, however, it can record the email link click.

Search the community, there are several discussion on email reporting.

best;m

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, things just get more curious in nature. I found out that the Adobe Analytics is showing 111 unique visitors while Marketo has 57 in the web activity report. Why would the Adobe Analytics be almost twice as many? We shouldn't have any unknown visitors as the only way to get to the page is through the email. We just want to have a better understanding as to what is going on.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Adobe's notion of "unique" is not tied to leads in your Marketo database.

[Raghav_Chugh]

Anita, I would say you can implement google analytics via tag manager as well in order to get unique visits or referrals or further drill down reporting.

+Matjaž Jaušovec you are right marketo page visits can be generated by bots  as well so we can't just rely on marketo reports for visits

[SanfordWhiteman]

Anita, I would say you can implement google analytics via tag manager as well in order to get unique visits or referrals or further drill down reporting.

GA isn't going to be any more consistent with Marketo than Adobe. It's just another set of session uniqueness + expiration rules to explain.

[KellyJoHorton]

As was said above, the clicks are most likely the result of email security software like Barracuda, which clicks links in emails to look for viruses before it actually delivers the email to the inbox. You can easily see if these clicks are pre-clicks or ghost clicks by looking at the Activity log. It will show Email Opened and Email Clicked before the email is actually delivered. Then you may see a real open and click after the email is delivered.

I haven't reported on clicks in a long time, because it's just not accurate anymore. You could use a filter of Clicked Link AND Viewed Web Page, but I think there are some security tools now that actually go view the web page as well.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, the current generation of mail scanners also loads target pages, including running Munchkin. 

[Arvin_Poole]

We have also added transparent 1x1 pixel images w/ a hyperlink including UTM parameters in our header, body and footer (human should not be able to see in web view) of our email. This doesn't tell you if bots clicked your other links but it does provide us insight into whether some of our emails have bots or not.

I wouldn't suggest putting "bot' as an UTM label, but something that differentiates your 1x1 pixel from your visible content.

[S_D1]

@Arvin_Poole 

hey Arvin, can you please explain how to add UTM to the 1x1pixel imagery and how should the clicked campaign look? Thanks for help on this.