Report on clicks dramatically increased

[Anonymous]

This week we noticed a tremendous increase in our click-thru-rates but we have changed anything in our marketing to cause such an increase.  Has anybody else noticed it?  We're seeing 3-4 times as many people clicking in our emails than we normally do. I'm wondering if Marketo changed something in the way it's tracking links?

[Anonymous]

There was an update to the Email Editor in the last week which includes new automatic tagging when designing new emails.  I don;t think that this should affect click throughs however.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

That wouldn't cause such a drastic increase. All that changed was that if you have a tracked link in the HTML side of the email, it is now automatically tracked in the TEXT version. I highly doubt that would cause this type of increase.

[Kenny_Elkington]

I guess the obvious question here is did you increase your send volume?  Are there any differences between emails pre and post, like certain common links having "mktNoTrack" or something?

[Anonymous]

Nope - no change in the send volume or the way we're tracking links in emails. 

[Anonymous]

We ended up having the same problem a while back. We noticed that a handful of leads were clicking on every email and every link in the email but never opened the email. It ended up being a anti-spam software on the users side, and it cause an influx on our numbers.  I would just check a couple of your leads that clicked through and see if they clicked every link and opened the email.

[Anonymous]

We code our links with Google Analytics.  We just sent out an email about 15 minutes ago, and Marketo is telling me it already has 320 clicks! But GA is telling us 34, which is way closer to what we'd expect. So I think this uptick is due to a change on Marketo's side because we have not done anything differently on our end. 

[Anonymous]

I ran a couple spot checks and it appears Marketo is recording clicks before the email is ever sent. Even when the lead hasn't opened the email! What is going on here?!?!

[Steven_Vanderb3]

This could still be a server's anti-spam software checking links in emails to make sure they are safe before returning a 250 OK response to us to denote the message was accepted/delivered.  I suppose theoretically you could also see a click before a bounce if their software checked the link, decided it didn't like it, and then bounced it back to us.

[Anonymous]

Hi Steven Vanderberg,

Has Marketo taken any steps to remove these false clicks from the activity? Since you can see that they're clicking before delivery, could Marketo filter those out so that our out-of-box reports are accurate and our triggers don't have to be filtered by "visits page"?

Building custom triggers and filtered reports is not sustainable. We would really like to just use the email reports that marketo produces, but the clicks are sometimes inflated by hundreds.

Thanks!