How can I accurately track website visitors (non-spam checker activity)?

[Roy_Hegger1]

How can I filter out 'spam checker' activity? 

I am currently filtering out anyone who doesn't view 2+ pages in a 24 hours period, but now I am running into the issue that the spam checker is clicking the link twice and appearing to visit twice.  These are not real website visits.  Would love to know how to filter out this activity.

After an email send, persons look like they visit the website but their duplicate activity gives me an indication that it's not real.  

[Ronen-Was-SRpro]

Hi Roy,

You can check our article and the comments from other members there.

Hope it helps you.

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Hey Ronen, Can you please share the link of your article. 

[Ronen-Was-SRpro]

Hope it helps, the comments of the other users also have a lot of information.

https://nation.marketo.com/thread/47185-bot-or-not-are-you-suffering-from-bot-clicks 

[Chelsea_Stinnet]

Hi Roy,

One solution you can look into implementing is inserting a Honeypot link into your email templates to catch bot clicks. A Honeypot is essentially a hidden link that is only visible to bots. You can set up an operational program that will add a person to a list when the hidden link is clicked, identifying them as a known bot user. You can then filter this list out of your web activity reports, email performance reports, etc. The major downside of this though is that it's an all or nothing solution. There is no way to filter out JUST a person's bot clicks. Best of luck!

[Ronnie_Duke2]

Hey Roy,

I posted about a similar issue here: Website "visits" from bots 

To date, there is no known easy solution. I have looked into services such as Kickfire that keeps a database of IP addresses that are linked to "ISP's" (these spam checkers are bucketed into the same group as ISP's such as Comcast), which one could theoretically program a solution to only trigger the munchkin tracking code only if it's not an ISP. The only problem is that if a user is on their home computer and not at their corporate IP, marketo would not log their activity. Similarly, this whole method would not work for B2B at all.

As Chelsea Stinnett‌ mentioned above, you could add the ghost link to the emails, but the problem with that also, is that it doesn't account for users who have a spam checker and ALSO actually click the email. 

One thing I implemented recently is a javascript library called Riveted which detects active time on the page (mouse movements, scrolling, keyboard, active tab, etc) and reports that active time in intervals. I have a cadence set to every 7 seconds to call the "visitedWebpage" munchkin function and record the time on the page appended to the url (i.e. www.some-url.com/?pageTime=7s, www.some-url.com/?pageTime=14s, etc). Then I can build out programs in Marketo to only score if the user has been on the page for longer than 7 seconds (longer than the average bot would spend on the page). So far, the results seem pretty good. I've described the process in a little more detail here: https://nation.marketo.com/thread/51570-how-to-invoke-custom-activity-by-using-js-munchkin-function-... 

Unfortunately all these solutions are pretty "hacky" until Marketo can come up with a solution on their own to fight against this. That would likely require a partnership or acquisition of a company like Kickfire that keeps a current database of known bot IP addresses (and then upsell all of us to use the service  )

Hope this helps!

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

That's a Smart Hack Ronnie Duke .

Hi Guys,

I am a Sreekanth (a Product Manager at Marketo). I was exploring solutions to bot activity, I have connected to multiple customers and was trying to understand their current challenges and what they expect from Marketo. I would love to know your inputs on the same if you are interested to connect please drop an email at sreekanth.reddy@adobe.com