Do link scanners (bot clicks) ever click twice on the same link?

[Denise_Greenbe7]

When companies employ link scanners to click all the links in an email to verify it's safe before delivering it to the user do they ever click the same link more than once? I'm thinking of requiring at least 2 clicks on a given link to qualify someone for Clicked status in an email program - and for scoring and IMs. I created a smart list as a test with the clicked twice requirement and still saw cases where there were 8-10 people from the same company in the smart list.

(Note that my SL has filters for clicked link in email, link is, min num times is 2 for each link in the email. An the filter logic is any. In other words, I didn't make the mistake of filtering for clicked twice in the email).

I posted questions on this topic in another thread on "bot clicks" but this is a specific question and I didn't want it to get lost in the other more general thread.

Thanks!

Denise

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, they do re-click links as a failsafe (since a link destination can change in an instant).

[Denise_Greenbe7]

Do they click 3 times?

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 2:39 PM Sanford Whiteman <

[SanfordWhiteman]

Over time, sure. The ones that integrate with mailbox servers (i.e. Exchange) can rescan periodically for as long as the message remains.

[DJ_Newman]

Sanford Whiteman‌ have you found a resolution to the human vs bot activity dilemma? I would be happy if I could filter out 3/4s of the bot clicks as long as I didn't lose any human clicks.

We have social links in all of our emails which does it make it easier to spot some bot activity. It baffles me to think there isn't an automated way to filter out this activity. e.g. "if clicked 7 links in 5min"

[SanfordWhiteman]

It baffles me to think there isn't an automated way to filter out this activity. e.g. "if clicked 7 links in 5min"

It's not as simple as that, though in any case it's not possible in the Marketo UI. The granularity simply isn't there, and triggers w/Activity Log lookback filters are a bad move for overall performance to begin with.

Offline crunching of the Activity Log using a timeseries database or SQL windowing can help.