Filter out email click bots

[Nick_Deboo1]

Hi

We have quite often bots clicking emails and we would like to filter these out.

We have in our smart list a filter that filters out "Clicked Link in Email" without "Opened Email". We noticed that these clicks are also 0-1 min after we sent the email. Can we filter these out in the smart list? The "date of activity" constraint in the "Clicked Link in Email" is only by date, not time....

Anyone other ideas?

[Nicholas_Hajdin]

Hi Nick,

You may find this thread useful: Bot-checks in emails You may want to consider exporting your database and running a list clean through a 3rd party vendor to validate email addresses, excluding those which return invalid. I also recommend identifying how the bots are entering your system, and enforce reCAPTCHA on forms if bots are a persistent problem.

Are you noticing a pattern in the bot email addresses? For example, I've seen situations where there will be multiple bots with email addresses that begin with the same five characters. If so, you could exclude email address starts with "XXX123".

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nick, it's about anti-phishing mail scanners, not malicious form posts.

And (other) Nick, there is no way to stop the reporting skew from this activity, as explored in several threads.

[Ed_King]

Nick,

Openprise has the technology to identify all bot clicks from your Marketo activity logs and provide multiple remediation options. Here is a blog post on the solution: Detecting and Compensating for Link Scanners / Spam Checkers / Clickbots for Marketo Users | Openpri...

Full disclosure. I work for Openprise. If you want to find out more about how this works. Just drop me a line at ed.king@openprisetech.com we would be happy to show you.

Ed

[SanfordWhiteman]

Ed...

... from the Community Guidelines.

[dillonlee02]

Agreed 100% - I am on here to learn, and not wanting to be given any sales pitches.

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

Here's a recent/prior thread that contain a lot of useful information around this issue (and unfortunately, no solution):

Re: [Shared Blog]: I Want to Believe, But: Your Email Link Clicks Aren’t Real