Link Clicks in Reporting for Links Not Present in Email

[Mathew_Kuehl]

When looking through reporting we are seeing Marketo counting link clicks for links that are not present in the emails covered in the reports.  The newest case is for a link that has not even been sent in an email before.  Does anyone else have this issue, know why the problem is happening, and have a fix to solve it?

[Maria_Cruz2]

Hi Matthew,

We are currently experiencing this issue. Do you mind telling me how you solved this please?

Thanks.

[Mathew_Kuehl]

I still have not been able to comfortably solve this.  We did complete reworks on some templates/assets, but that did not seem to help.  Instead, I have had to basically build around the problem by finding commonality for the fake links, and then building logic to suppress scoring on these actions...

[SanfordWhiteman]

And what was the commonality?

This is a very strange report, I must say... if it turns out to be affecting everyone we need to escalate it.

[Mathew_Kuehl]

Likely differs per instance, but for me the majority of the fake links had a ".html" in them.  For the links that were not that .html, I just looked for the similar emails that carried the issue and cut out the links.  Since the outage, though, things have shifted in a negative way where not only are fake clicks landing on links that are not available in the emails (present no where, not even in html), but now I am getting multiple fake clicks on links in the email across all links inflating scores way up, and sending garbage to sales... again, have had to build logic around these to prevent this from happening as much as possible.

[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).

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're seeing on clicks on links that aren't present at all in the email?  That would quite... sinister... if true. Let's dive deeper into the HTML and confirm that. You can send one of the emails to sandy@teknkl.com and I'll send you back a list of all the clickable links (including those that aren't visible).

[Maria_Cruz2]

Sent you an email let me know what you find. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi Mathew - we had a similar challenge with our email reports and we also noticed it coincided with an error where there were more clicks than opens. After discussing it with Marketo support, they informed us that with some spam softwares at companies - they will create fake clicks that inflate/misrepresent what's happening in our email engagement reports and smart lists. We're working on a workaround to create "honeypot" links that will detect these software tools and help us weed out any "fake clicks" in our reports. I don't have a solution yet....Let me know what else you find!

[Mathew_Kuehl]

Hi Tabitha,

  I have already solved for that previously.  The issue above covers leads that have opened the emails in question.  By setting that filter this removes the spam software fake clicks.  The issue here is more that the report is showing clicks for URLs that are literally not located anywhere on the email.  For example, reports show a quiz link being clicked for an email that in no way talks about the quiz or has any links that lead to the quiz.

Thank you for your response, though.

Best regards,
Mathew

[SanfordWhiteman]

Mathew, the Q should be moved to Products​ ("Central" is for non-product-specific marketing topics).

I've never experienced this problem but if you have scoured the template and email for the links and see nothing (remember to check tokens), open a ticket with Support.