Link Clicks in Reporting for Links Not Present in Email

[SanfordWhiteman]

I only care about clicks on links that weren't in the body of an email.  Other clicks aren't exactly "fake," they're just automated. A click registered on a link that was never published in an email is a bug; while a click by a mail scanner isn't a bug.

Can you tell me whether there was a commonality to a Clicked Link events that you can prove did not at any time exist in the email body (note an email that changes body content still has old links in people's Inboxes)?

[Mathew_Kuehl]

As noted in my previous message... it is likely different by instance, but for mine it was .html links.

As for the fake clicks, these look to be more a system error, than an automated spam checker, but that is out of scope for this conversation.

[SanfordWhiteman]

So

(1) all your Clicked Email events for hrefs that end in .html refer to hrefs that have never existed in the email content at any time?

or

(2) all your Clicked Email events for hrefs that have never existed in email content end in .html, but there are other Clicked Email events for .html links that *did* exist in email content?

(These are different degrees of commonality.)

What does Support say? It should be easy (relatively) for you to establish that a new email that has never been edited is logging clicks on links it doesn't contain.

This could be a catastrophic bug if it exists widely, and we in the Community need to know as much as possible. I don't believe this is happening on any of my instances (no reports) but it naturally is hard to diagnose from the outside in. I'm going to try probing via the API (asset content + activity) but want to be sure what to look for.

Why do you say automated clicks are a (Marketo) system error? What it is it about the pattern that is different from mail scanning?

[Mathew_Kuehl]

In some cases it was an old .html link that was removed, in others it had never been part of the email or underlying template.  When the link was present previously it has been removed both from underlying html, and finished email, but now gathers a large amount of clicks that are impossible. 

I have a support ticket in for the other issue.

[SanfordWhiteman]

In some cases it was an old .html link that was removed, in others it had never been part of the email or underlying template. When the link was present previously it has been removed both from underlying html, and finished email, but now gathers a large amount of clicks that are impossible.

OK, I haven't seen this. Maybe your database is corrupt. I've seen dbs hold on to obsolete data in very strange ways (such as freezing a {{trigger.token}} to its initial value in the instance).