False positive on email click affecting lead scoring

[KanakoTone]

Hello people,

We are experiencing similar issue as this huge discussion Spam filters registering clicks? . However the situation is slightly different from what's reported there.

Today, after sending out an email, more than 20 leads were qualified as MQLs based on lead score they (or the spam filters) earned. In my case, they did not have "opened email" activity but have "clicked email" and "visited webpage".

I was thinking to tweak the global lead scoring for Click activity as

Clicked email is ANY

and, Opened email is ANY

then I realized that this filter may still add score for Click if someone opened Email A in person in the past and a spam filter clicked Email B that was sent out today.

Is there any way to set the trigger with Opened Email B and Clicked Email B in the global lead scoring smart campaign?

[Anonymous]

We are hitting this issue now and it's causing a lot of problems with discrepancies between the out of box email reports and our interesting moments.  We are reporting using the email reports, which are now appearing to be completely useless since they do not allow us to filter by "visits page".  We have the ability to filter the program membership changes, as well as interesting moments, which we trigger scoring and rep alerts off of, but if we pull any reports off the the email sends, our clicks are off by HUNDREDS. 

The "visits page" filter also doesn't work if you want to link to something externally like an analyst report.  We would have to build a redirect page on our domain to register the click, and then send the user to the external page to make that work.  Multiply that by 50 sends a week, and it's not a very sustainable process. Ideally Marketo could create some kind of filters for their out of box reports to identify clicks that happen before delivery (the tell-tale sign of a bot click) and not register those clicks in the email reports.

Has anyone seen any ideas for Marketo to improve reporting for click and open rates so that users aren't building ad hoc filters to try to get accurate numbers?

Thanks for any help.

[Dan_Stevens_]

We modified our "clicks CTA link in email" scoring campaign to the following:

So within the lead records you've identified as false positives, are you saying that you are seeing "click" activity AND "visited web page" activity?  Are you seeing this in the activity log?

[KanakoTone]

Dan,

In the activity log, I see both Click and Visited Webpage activities. But no Open activity. So your scoring campaign probably still adds score for our leads with false positive.

Having said that, I like your idea of filtering out the links! I can't believe I haven't thought about it...

[Dan_Stevens_]

Unfortunately, we had to remove this filter from our campaigns (including the lead scoring ones).  Now that this issue was top of mind again, I decided to some additional testing.   We're finding in many instances, Marketo isn't logging the "visited web page" activity until upwards of 5 minutes after the click link activity.  Therefore, the trigger campaigns aren't triggering with this filter in place.  Thought we had this one solved.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

To avoid this, you would test the visit wbe page in a choice in the flow, after a 5 minutes wait. as you cannot have the "visited web page" filter with a constraint in a choice, you would have to use a smart list, though.

-Greg

[KanakoTone]

Interesting... This is what the activity log looks like on my end. I sent out an email around 10:45am.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Kanako,

Remember that Opened email is not reliable. It is only detected by Marketo if the leads downloads images. So it may well happen that a real human clicked an email without apparently opening it.

-Greg

[KanakoTone]

Hi Greg,

I see, however, all the leads in concern now are clicking every link (even privacy policy link) right after the email delivery.

It might be just easier to kill the lead scoring for Clicked link. ...

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

HI again Kanako,

You may want to:

1. limit the scoring campaign to run once per hour
2. Vote here:

-Greg

[KanakoTone]

Greg,

I already voted for the idea

Could you tell me how I could limit the scoring campaign to run once per hour? I see an option to set date of activity but it doesn't seem liek the one you're talking about.

Sincerely,

Kanako

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Go to the "schedule" tab of the scoring smart campaign and edit the "Smart Campaign settings". Then set it as is:

-Greg