Email opens/clicks false positives

[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.