Fake clicks followed by fake web visits

[Frank_Buzzanca]

Hello,

We've had a lot of issues with fake, server/spam filter clicks in the past. I have read several posts in the community and have never really found a fully-functioning solution. That said, some people have suggested that requiring a web page visit to also occur is an option. We are now seeing fake web visits that are accompanying the fake clicks. Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there a solution out there or a post about this already? You can see in the image below that upon delivery all of the links in the email are being clicked and then all of the web pages are being visited.

This is a data nightmare!

Thank you,

Frank

[Michael_Mason]

I'm stoked I had the same idea as you, Josh!!

So the mail scanners see that link and essentially mark it as spam?

[Tim_Madel1]

I think this is the key question - will spam scanners mark emails with an invisible link as spam.  If not - this is the best solution I have seen!

Thanks Mike!

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is just a sign of a thorough mail scanner.  In order to determine the final, unattended target of a link, it's necessary to load the page in a headless browser and see where it goes. The headless browser will probably not run GA as it's a super-well-known analytics package, but other packages like Munchkin will still execute because there's no way of knowing if they're mere trackers or directing the user experience.

[Frank_Buzzanca]

Thank you, Sanford. These mail scanners are really raining on my parade. It's quite hard to perform behavior-based marketing when you can't trust simple behaviors like email clicks and web visits. I do hope that Marketo is working on some sort of fix.

[Josh_Hill13]

Marketo needs to fix this.

We had this happen and now it's triggering visits pages on our attempted spam scanner trap. It might become self aware one day.