[Q&A Coffee Break] 07/25/23, 8am PST: Deliverability & Bots, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[Jon_Chen]

Our third Adobe Marketo Engage Community Q&A Coffee Break featuring Marketo Engage Champions @Beth_Massura and @Ajay_Sarpal2 is now OVER. Thanks to all who attended or asked a question, and we hope to catch you at our next session! 

Email bot activity can artificially inflate email opens and click data, leading to inaccurate metrics and misleading performance analysis. Similarly, mastering email deliverability can help ensure that your marketing campaigns are reaching their intended audience. Learn how to optimize your email marketing campaigns by filtering out email bot activity and improving your email deliverability rate with Marketo Engage Champions and Experts Beth Massura and Ajay Sarpal in our upcoming Coffee Break on July 25^th.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask these two pros about their best and most effective techniques to identify and eliminate false opens and clicks, automate email deliverability management tasks, validate sources for hard and soft bounces, and so much more!

This is a text-only event that takes place only here on the Marketing Nation Community. Post your burning questions, hot tips, key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live for that hour, but the conversation can continue! 

For some guidance, here are some sample questions you can ask about:

• How do I know if I’m having a deliverability issue in Marketo?
• What are some foundational things I should do to support good deliverability?
• How can I find spam traps in my database?
• How can I stop bots from filling out my forms?
• How can you prevent and reduce bot form fills using Marketo best practices, such as form design, validation, progressive profiling, etc.? How does DMARC help in improving Email Deliverability?
• How to use reCAPTCHA to identify and filter out bot form fills in Marketo?

REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE 

• Must be signed into the Community during the 1-hour period.
• Must post an Adobe Marketo Engage question or comment on Deliverability and Bots.
• Must tag either or both Champs in your question (@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5).
• Be sure to periodically REFRESH the page to see new questions and new responses in the thread!
• Please note this is a TEXT-ONLY event, meaning that there will be no webinar, video call, or recording. All questions and answers will occur on this thread!

FEATURED EXPERTS

Ajay Sarpal

Ajay Sarpal is a 4x Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Co-Leader of Virtual Marketo Measure User Group and India Virtual Marketo Engage User Group. He has 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation and is ambidextrous in fixing broken Martech processes and bringing transparency/accountability on multi-channel Marketing revenue influence reports. Ajay is also a 3x Subject Matter Expert and a Marketo Certified Solution Architect who can design and implement complex marketing automation solutions. Ajay helps build Adobe Marketo Engage Certification exams (Professional, Expert, and Architect levels) and now runs his own consulting practice assisting clients in accelerating the demand generation and ROI tracking.

Beth Massura

Beth is deeply involved with the Adobe community as a 4x Marketo Engage Champion, Certified Master and Subject Matter Expert for the credential program. She has a passion for identifying opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness within the marketing environment. As a Senior Marketing Operations Consultant, she works with a variety of clients to troubleshoot and proactively address critical areas such as deliverability and database health.

[Vinay_Kumar]

Awesome! We're in for a productive and informative session.

[Max_Francisco1]

Looking forward to this! I have so many questions 😂

[Jon_Chen]

Hey @Max_Francisco1, super glad to hear it! I do want to mention that you're more than welcome to start queueing your questions now by simply replying to the thread. Be sure to mention the two experts, Beth and Ajay, so that they are notified via their email and Community notifications. Any questions you ask before the start of the Coffee Break session will be answered in the order that is received! Let me know if you have any questions.

[Max_Francisco1]

One of my questions is exactly like others here, we get clicks on our preheader logo, on our social media links, etc... and other links that are less likely to be people clicking. These click numbers never match though, so it's hard to identify what was a bot from a human click.

[David_Lyons]

@Beth_Massura  and @Ajay_Sarpal5 can I configure email performance reports to better reflect human click activity and not destination servers checking links immediately upon delivery? If not, is there a good ratio to apply to the performance report click/open counts to manually calculate a more realistic click/open rate?

[Emily_Bright]

This is the same question I have for @Beth_Massura and @Ajay_Sarpal5 !

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @David_Lyons and @Emily_Bright ,

This is a great question, and truly a challenge. Out of the box, the email performance reports offer general open/click activity and there isn't a specific setting you could use to immediately filter the reports as described. I haven't come across any general/industry ratios to use to help calculate a "realistic" open/click rate.

Here are a couple ideas to look into and develop further:

• Add a hidden link in the email (such as a linked 1x1 pixel) that would not be clicked by a human and use that to filter out bots/email scanners from the report. However, a real person who clicked the email after the email scanner initially did would also be filtered out. You might be able to incorporate a timeframe to exclude only the first (bot/scanner) click - e.g. any clicks within x minutes of the hidden link click should not be counted, but after x minutes they could, but this might require complex data manipulation outside Marketo.
• If you have a data warehouse and a data analysis team, perhaps they could use the Marketo activity data to develop models to make a best guess as to whether it was a real person vs. a bot/scanner.

[trevlarrr]

This is an issue we've had with server clicks and been a big issue pushing engaged users to Salesforce campaigns when they hadn't actually clicked. Will try something like the pixel and time delay and see what results that gives us

[David_Lyons]

Thank you @Beth_Massura for the options. We haven't tried the hidden 1-pixel link yet. We've tried working with the timing, but the order of delivery/click isn't consistent so we missed excluding some server clicks. It's worth trying again.