[Shared Blog]: I Want to Believe, But: Your Email Link Clicks Aren’t Real

[Casey_Grimes]

A quick update here: as of today, I've picked up some new behavior by a different major antispam provider that may cause further wrinkles in this, especially around user agents (because I'm detecting different things in Marketo and on the server itself. :/) This particular company is using Amazon EC2 instances to check links and is making it to full web page visits. Hoping to have more clarity on this in the next week or so.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Vote here:

[Michael_Guanci]

So far we have had decent results using a combination of Dan's method and Sanford's redirect.  However, I noticed that some members from eBay are getting counted as a real click even though they all happen within a minute after the email is sent/delivered.  They are clicking the link and visiting the page that has the re-direct.

This is for our ABM program so we want to include eBay in this moving forward (we don't want to exclude them is what I am saying), is there a time constraint I can add that I am not thinking of?  Like did not click on email within 3 minutes of being sent?  I am following the guidelines Dan outlined for the 30 minute wait and seeing if they visit the web page. 

[Marketo_HyperX_]

Our Customer Support Manager Mariska noticed that the clicks happen 1 minute before the email is delivered.  Did you all see the same behavior?

To avoid wait steps, do you think this would work:

Thanks!

Amy

[SanfordWhiteman]

Your Smart Campaign doesn't reflect the order your describe. Please look at it more closely. Also: give up on trying to solve this using Smart Campaigns.

[Marketo_HyperX_]

Hi Sanford.  The false click happens 1 minute before the email is actually delivered.  Thus, I believe my smart campaign logic is correct and will filter out the false clicks.  Thoughts?  

[SanfordWhiteman]

Smart Campaigns do not allow for 1m granularity.

Again if it were this easy, no one would be worried about it. In fact all you're seeing is some of the mail scanner clicks. The other ones are undetectable. That's the whole idea.