Instant clicks on email links

[Anonymous]

Sometimes when I send an email, immediately I will have links clicked by numerous leads but I don't believe that they are actually clicking these links. I am suspicious because within a second of receiving the email, they have clicked on every possible link in the email, including our social media links and privacy policy (seems like a bot-type of activity).

Has anyone experienced something like this, or have information to shed light on this sort of fishy activity?

Thank you in advance!

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hey Jackie,

This is an intermittent behavior of some mail servers.  They will occasionally probe links from a sender to search for malicious activity prior to delivering an email.

[Anonymous]

Is there any way to prevent this intermittent server behavior from affecting lead scores?

When this happens, a lead is suddenly credited for a lot of points for clicking links to downloads, forms, web links, etc. So suddenly they're pushing to sales because they're lead score skyrockets. But then, it turns out the lead did none of this and sales received a very unqualified lead showing as a qualified lead.

Thanks much!
Dante

[SanfordWhiteman]

Dante, unfortunately the whole idea behind this behavior is to prevent abuse by pre-scanning everything on the linked page.  As such, it wouldn't benefit the servers using this method to identify themselves in any way that could let you send back content that would be different from what a human user would see.

That said, maybe some vendors are leaving behind some identifying marks by accident.  But those would still be bugs that would eventually be fixed.

[Anonymous]

Consider modifying the qualification rules on your lead scoring program. I see a lot of people who build their lead scoring to allow leads to go through "every time" but this is generally unnecessary and can cause issues in situations like the one you mention. Once every hour should be more than sufficient.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Kristen. But I don't see how that would help. It takes a bot one second to click every link presented to it. So the email has 6 or 7 links (social links in footer, about in header, and links in body) and a bot clicks them all in a second after sending. Don't see how once every hour would help this.

On a separate note though.....perhaps I don't understand how "go through every time" works. I thought that just meant any time the trigger/action takes place, the lead is allowed to "run through." Why wouldn't that be advised for things like download pdf, click link, fill out form, etc.? Seems like we'd want every instance of this recorded, no?