Email was clicked before it was delivered? It's a link scanner

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Sanford Whiteman​ Grégoire Michel - do you know if switching from a shared to a dedicated IP might help reduce the number of these false positive server clicks?

We've been seeing several cases lately where we send an email and we get a spike in clicks from leads from the same company with this sort of activity that is pretty identical for each lead:

What's interesting is that it looks like the email was delivered ~50 minutes before the clicks happened.

[Elise_Eidsness2]

Thank you for your ideas. I just created an idea post to Marketo - asking them to adjust their standard email reports to remove these false clicks from the data that is being displayed. We use these reports on a daily basis and they are inaccurate due to the false click data that is displaying. https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Ideas/Marketo-to-adjust-standard-email-reports-to-remove-the-false/idi...

Please 'like' the idea post!

[Jenna_Teeters]

Hello! 

How did you set up your scoring filters/smart lists to adjust for these? I'm struggling with Sales trust right now because they received an automated subscription that included these false clicks. I'm obviously not a Marketo expert but am trying to learn to filter out discrepancies for these types of items. Thanks! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

There's no filter that will accurately cull the mail scanner clicks and visits based on individual activities.

And this is by design: as mentioned elsewhere, the intent of the mail scanner is to behave exactly like a real human interaction. If there were a technique to distinguish machine hits from human hits based on a single click/pageview, then the mail scanner would be entirely worthless, because the malicious actor would simply use that exact technique to avoid detection, then deliver the malicious payload to humans.

The short answer: stop scoring on clicks.

The longer answer: if you extract all your activities (using the Bulk Extract API) to a database, you can make more granular decisions about the frequency of clicks in a rolling window and then reimport into Marketo with field updates. It's still not 100% correct, and won't be in real-time.