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

[Dan_Stevens_]

I recently came across this external blog post by Courtney Grimes​ and thought it would be useful to share with the community (great post, btw, Courtney).  Especially since there has been a lot of discussion/questions recently on false-positives of email opens and clicks:

https://www.demandlab.com/insights/blog/want-believe-email-link-clicks-arent-real/

I did want to comment on the guidance to combat this:

After testing this idea on dozens of different Marketo instances, the single most effective way I’ve found to track email clicks is a combination of two filters: Email was delivered + Visited web page: [web page linked to in email]

Typically, one would simply add these two filters to the smart list of the trigger campaign.  When we tried that in the past, it didn't work for us since Marketo doesn't log this activity immediately as it happens - at least not in our case (especially the "visited web page" activity).  We've seen up to a 45 minute delay.  So we used an alternate approach: we included a "visited web page" choice in our "change program status" flow step.  And prior to that flow step, we also included a 45 minute wait step.  The only issue with this approach is if the user ever visited this page in the past, the choice will still be true.  In other words, the choice step is not directly tied to this instance of the email click.

As Courtney states in her wrap-up, there really is no fool-proof solution.  But if you had to pick one, this is probably the best approach.

[jmillionaire]

with this approach, there will always be the manual step of adding the email link URLs to the false positive detecting smartlist, correct? feels like a dumb question, but trying to write a process so need explicit steps for executing.

[Michael_Guanci]

This is a great catch Grégoire Michel​!

I was blanking on how I could only include "new" visitors.   Thankfully I am the only user in my company doing the back-end production but was totally blanking on how to differentiate old visitors to visitors who should continue in the flow.

Would you recommend adding the clicks link in email into that smart list as well?  I want to try and template this smart list for future campaigns.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Michael,

No need to add the "click link" since they already in the smart campaign trigger.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Dan,

Another solution that we've tried before is adding a small 1x1 white image pixel into our email templates that links to a landing page. The theory being that a real human will not see the 1x1 pixel, so all of the clicks on that pixel that go through to that landing page are bots.

Then in our smart lists, we add another filter that says "did not visit web page: "enter the bot landing page name" as an additional way to filter out the bot traffic.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Courtney - there are two issues with this approach:

1. What if a link scanner does indeed click on that hidden image but then ultimately sends the email to the recipient's inbox - and the person clicks on one of the valid links?  This approach will disregard this legitimate activity.
2. As mentioned in Courtney's post, using these sorts of tactics could ultimately backfire and be seen as trying to send a malicious email.