Email opens/clicks false positives

[Anonymous]

We are seeing a bunch of different leads from the same company (50+) "open" and "click" almost every email we send them. This is breaking lead scoring as all leads are being sent to the inside sales team to investigate.

Curious if this is something anyone's seen before? We are baffled. Support doesn't seem to know either.

[Anonymous]

We've been seeing the same thing, most like spam crawlers intercepting the email before it hits the inboxes. We're implementing a workaround where we do not score or send the lead through the usual campaign or workflow unless the email is opened AND clicked. In our instances, most of the leads have not opened the email but are showing to have clicked on email links, which can't possibly happen.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

SD 2SF - That shouldn't be happening in Email Performance Reports, as we log an "open" event if we ever see a "click" for a specific lead. Can you reach out to me if you are seeing cases where a lead has a "click" but no open? My email address is jcooperman@marketo.com

This scenario is valid and could happen if user has "show all images" turned off. So, it's important that we do this even though some crawlers may give you false positives.

[hughjohnson]

I have just tested this and get a HUGE difference on contacts count if I create a SmartList based on "Clicks" vs "Clicks" AND "Opens".  Adding the additional 'AND Opens' filter reduces the count by about 80%. I guess this is the correct thing to do, but does anyone else have any views?

[Darshil_Shah1]

For more accurate results, as Justin said, you should create the email performance report - as Marketo backfills the Open activities for people that have just click email activities on that respective email assets (and not the open email activity, assuming that a legit click won't happen w/o opening the email).

Also, in order to filter out the spam/bot open/click activities, I'd also recommend using the email bot filtering feature that was introduced by Marketo last year. You can either choose to filter out the identified bot activities from logging altogether from your instance or choose to log them in your instance but mark those activities as potential bot activity and you may filter out those by using the available constraints in the email open/click filters and triggers.

[Anonymous]

I'm experiencing the same problems here.  

I also just found out that from a couple leads and verified by our IT team that or email tracking domain (the encoded urls in the email) is being blocked, although our landing page domain is fine.

I'm starting a little investigation to see if this is a problem with just my email traking domain being blocked (which I could potentially change, though its only been in use for ~7 months), or a widespread problem because the email scanning is detecting a different URL in the email from the URL of the landing page.

It would be great if others could also check somehow and post their findings.

[Dan_Stevens_]

We're finding more and more of our recipients' email servers blocking the Marketo tracking domain as well - and not our own.  It's more challenging than ever to reach our users' inbox.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Dan, what do you mean by servers blocking the tracking domain? Explain what you are seeing.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Kiersti Esparza​ can you comment on this?

[Anonymous]

Justin Cooperman​ - What I've seen and has been reported to me, is that the email tracking url (ie: mkto.marketo.com/agbwe0183gkbsdv) ends up either hanging indefinitely and not redirecting to the intended url (ie: pages.marketo.com/awesome-lp.html), or else there is some sort of firewall message saying the page is blocked. Very prevalent in China (they call this the"Great Firewall" or GFW)

[Dan_Stevens_]

We experienced this one as well with a campaign in China last month.  We thought it was something configured on our own internal firewall in China (since we have stricter rules in certain countries).  We fixed it for our internal users.  But thanks for enlightening me on this more widespread/known issue, Ray Huang​

[Dan_Stevens_]

They're blocking mktomail.com

[Dan_Stevens_]

We're seeing this more and more these days. Especially in certain countries like China. In my prior company, we had this same issue with all emails sent to AT&T recipients.

[Justin_Cooperm2 · Accepted solution]

Likely their email provider is crawling the email content prior to delivery. Scanning content and images in the email, and also following any links within the email.