Email Bot Tracking

[AGoldberg98]

Hello, hope everyone is having a good day! 

Our Marketo instance has accrued more and more bot data, and it is getting increasingly harder and harder to identify the bot data in a meaningful way, so we can identify it without a doubt. I've been playing around with the filters in Marketo, including:

Match with IAB bot lists

Match with proximity pattern

Bot Activity False

Bot Activity True

While I am getting contacts through these filters, I wanted to see if anyone has documentation or explanations on how these work. Please let me know. I also am curious about a few other constraints on catching bot data, including:

Browser (I would be interested to see what browsers bots could be using, if this is a common practice)

Device (Similar to Browser, I would like to see what devices bots, if any, to differentiate them from normal traffic)

Is Predictive Content (Curious to know what this is)

Any other fields that might be relevant for this deep dive

Any help/feedback is welcome, I would really appreciate it. Thanks! 

[nmillar]

@AGoldberg98 here is a doc that might be helpful explaining these! https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/administration/email-setup/fil...

[AGoldberg98]

Thanks @nmillar I really appreciate it. I am going to read through this now, but I was curious if you knew anything about filtering for bot data in a smart list so that we can see retroactively what contacts could be bot data? Let me know, thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Browser (I would be interested to see what browsers bots could be using, if this is a common practice)

Device (Similar to Browser, I would like to see what devices bots, if any, to differentiate them from normal traffic)

Is Predictive Content (Curious to know what this is)

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Both malicious bots and good bots designed to be invisible (like mail security scanners) use the same UA and Device fingerprints as human traffic. They would not be useful otherwise. Some sloppily written malicious bots leave known fingerprints but that’s an exceptional case.

Web spiders, on the other hand, are not designed to be invisible and do have unique fingerprints. You can see a comprehensive list here.

Predictive Content has nothing to do with bots. It’s Marketo’s AI-powered dynamic content, and clicks on such content is tagged accordingly.

[AGoldberg98]

This is great @SanfordWhiteman, I really appreciate it. Will look into this further now