Misreporting Email Clicks - Hitting Email Probes

[Anonymous]

Hi,
We have an alert email go out to our sales reps when a lead clicks on a link within an email. The problem is, we hit some "email probes" that scan emails and click all links. So it's not actually the lead interacting with our email.

Does anyone know a way to filter out these email probes from reporting and Smart Lists. For example, the smart list I created that triggers the flow to send an email to the sales rep...I use the trigger "clicks link in email." I'd love to set this so that it only considers if the lead clicked less than 3 links (the probes will click every single link in an email and most of our genuine leads do not). However, the constraints on the "clicks link in email" trigger only allows for minimum number of links clicked--the opposite of what we need.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Tina

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Tina Lumbis,

Create an "Email Probes" exclusion smart list with a "clicks link in email", and min times = 3.

Then in your target smart list, just add a member of smart list filter IS NOT "Email Probes".

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Brilliant. Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

But isn't there a logical gap here?  If a lead's anti-abuse mechanism clicks 5 times, and the lead her/himself clicks once, that's still 6 clicks registered to the lead.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Sandord,

My understanding is that these email probes are email addresses that are not real persons anyway.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

That's not true, though.  It's enterprise anti-abuse software used by real persons that does this.

[Casey_Grimes]

Not necessarily. The saner solution would be to check if the email was opened AND clicked; although I have seen a very small handful of anti-abuse software render both the tracking pixel and faux-click, it's been a hundredth of a percentage point. In fact, I really wish with the rise of scanning clicks Marketo would bake the opening requirement into signalling a click on their end. Oh well.

[Anonymous]

We tried to filter for just folks who have an open and click. The issue with that is that the anti-spam software was registering the click and then the real person was registering the open. Anyone know of a way to filter for people where the open happens before the click?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Anyone know of a way to filter for people where the open happens before the click?

Well, you kind of said it yourself.  Trigger on the click, filter on the open.  But you're oversimplifying: if someone doesn't view images, then clicks, then later views images, you're going to ignore them because the  order is "wrong."

Bottom line: all the attempts to solve this problem using Smart Lists are fragile, causing you to lose actionable human activities in an ill-fated attempt to detect machine activities.  As I've mentioned a few times here, the closest near-solution -- and it too depends on mail scanners behaving a certain way, albeit in a way that proper coding practices would suggest they probably will -- is to use an intelligent tracking service that doesn't log the click immediately via HTTP but depends instead on asynchronous JS.

[eguard]

Hi Tina,

I came across your article while doing my own research on this topic. Marketo now has a neat feature for filtering out bot activity. For anyone else landing on this thread, check out the Filtering Bot Activity section in Experience League.