[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.

[Nicholas_Manojl]

Talk to support. Tell them about this feature*, and see if they can turn it on if it's a real problem for you:

My client turned it on recently and the results have been much more sensible than before.

*just don't ask me what it does exactly and if it actually has any impact on reporting metrics.

[Anonymous]

err... thanks, I guess? any other nifty surprises in that feature manager we consultants should know of?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Nicholas - what portion of the UI is your screenshot from?

BTW, we had this enabled a while ago and really didn’t see a difference. Good to hear that’s it’s working for some customers.

[Nicholas_Manojl]

I'm a Marketo employee so I get a little extra view of the feature manager.

[Kim_Wieczner]

Do you have any advice for how to enable this as a non-Marketo employee? What does it look like on the reporting end/what types of automation do you have set up on this trigger? Thanks!

[Casey_Grimes]

Oh, hey, this is here! I tend to only post super-Marketo-related items on the Champions blog, so for more generalized things like this (and to hear from fabulous folks like Liz Medeiros​ and Alex Greger​) you should check out https://www.demandlab.com/insights.

That said: the usual recommendation is for smaller instances to go ahead and do what Dan mentions--a trigger of "Visited Web Page" along with a filter of "Email Was Delivered" within a certain time period (usually 2-3 weeks) with a Program Status Change of "Clicked" or similar--but I like the idea of putting a wait step on just visiting the web page, waiting, and doing a delivery check for more active or larger instances.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hey Courtney, coupla things:

• On your diagram you note that the branding (click tracking) server drops a cookie before redirecting. Technically, yeah, but that load-balancing affinity cookie from Marketo's F5 infrastructure isn't related to Munchkin and/or tracking, and need not be accepted by the browser. Everything works fine without it. It would (IMO) be better to leave it out of the diagram b/c some people do think Munchkin sessions start at the click tracking phase.
• To the degree Visits Web Page + Email Was Delivered is actionable, isn't Visits Web Page with a Referrer constraint on your branding domain just as actionable*?  Such visits always resulted from delivered emails, by definition (as long you have not completely disabled tracking, which you didn't recommend). Or maybe I'm missing a nuance to this combo.  EDIT: I see now you're assuming the links aren't taggable with email-specific info! But I may be on to something in this regard... stay tuned.

[SanfordWhiteman]

stay tuned.

A glimpse of what I just started working on:

The above is a legitimate, human-driven Clicked Email event, distinguished from automated clicks on the same link by a special-purpose User-Agent ("TrueVoyage").

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks for keeping us in suspense!  Looking forward to learn more about this "TrueTrack" approach that you're teasing us with.  Although, if it's indeed an approach that all of us can use to ensure click activity is legit, you might want to sell the technology to Marketo first.  But maybe not - Marketo may then offer it as a paid add-on! 😉

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'm not sure about "ensure" but it'll help you avoid the Wait Step/Email Delivered guesswork.

You have my email, so let me know and I'll set you up w/a quick test.

[Joelle_Andrews]

Dan, are you writing this because you've seen an uptick in this behavior recently?  If so, you're not alone!  I'm also looking for a method to split the difference between too much marketing suspend and too much false-positive clicking.  Let me know what you find out!  🙂

[Danielle_Wong]

Hi Joelle, How can I tell if there's false positive clicks on my emails?

[Joelle_Andrews]

Hi Danielle -

Go to the activity log of any lead you suspect.  If you see multiple "clicked link in email" all in a row and occurring within the same 60 seconds or so, you've probably got a false click.  We figured this out when we were pinged on Super Bowl Sunday that a bunch of people wanted demos of our product right away.  I'd love to believe that, but Super Bowl Sunday??  😄

[Danielle_Wong]

Ah okay!! I'd love to believe that too!!

Good thinking. I will check it out!

Thanks Joelle

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Joelle - I'm sharing this because it's been a topic of concern for some time now (especially in the B2B world).  And to be honest, I don't think most users even know it's an issue.  They see the positive metrics in their email dashboards and reports and just take it for granted that they are completely accurate.  And that's not the case.  Not for us and many others who have been active is a variety of related discussions here in the community.  It's not Marketo's fault - although I welcome any innovative approach they may come up with to combat this).  It's the nature of the business - that successfully making it into the user's inbox - especially when sending from a mass email platform like Marketo - is more challenging than ever (even though the "delivered" percentages say otherwise).  And it's even more challenging for those of us that focus our campaigns using an account-centric/ABM approach (marketing to several contacts in the same account).

Here are some of the discussions I'm referring to:

Email not delivered?

How do you make your email deliverability unstoppable?

Now that ABM is such a large focus for many marketers, how are you operationally emailing everyone e...

Re: False positive Email delivered?

Spam filters registering clicks?

Re: False positive on email click affecting lead scoring

Email Clicks on Delivery But No Matching Web Page Visits Logged

Email Bots Logging Web Activity - HELP

Email was clicked before it was delivered? It's a link scanner

Misreporting Email Clicks - Hitting Email Probes

[dillonlee02]

For Marketo Landing Pages:

Shouldn't you be able to do the following that involve Marketo landing pages as the main CTA that you're trying to see clicked?

To my understanding, email protection systems such as Barracuda and Proofpoint click links within your email during the first few minutes of launch (e.g., 1 minute or less), and they don't tend to actually visit the web page as they are only checking to see if said links are malicious. This is how I would go about setting this up if I am running a triggered program that will listen for anyone who clicked the link in the email AND Visited Web Page. Would this setup be correct?

For Website Links:

Email protection systems will click on the links, but not actually open the email. This is my thought, but someone please correct me if I am wrong. Would you be able do the following:

And then you would be able to write to a static list in the flow, I'm sure?

Now, another way that I'm thinking about is that I'm sure you could add a Date of Activity constraint to filter out spam clicks too (especially if you are wanting to see who clicked the email in a certain amount of time (e.g., 1 minute or less)). You could set up a Triggered campaign to run, and let's say your email goes out Today at 2 PM ET, you could set a reminder to yourself to monitor the campaign between 2:00 PM ET and 2:01 PM ET, and to turn off the triggered campaign after that and have it written to a list like above? Only thing different would be using the Date of Activity constraint in your smart list as such:

and then...

OR if you want to automate this process, here is what I would do....

hit Run Once

and have this scheduled to run 1 minute after your email launches...

Just some thoughts. Everything I said above may not be entirely the most accurate way, and if you personally think the time limit in the Date of Activity constraint should be adjusted, feel free to move up to 2 or 3 minutes, but usually these email protection systems click malicious links literally within minutes, and don't open the email nor visit your web pages. Only checking links if they are malicious or not.

Hope this helps! Happy Marketo.

Best,

Dillon

[Michael_Kopp1]

Wow, I just discovered this issue and feel a little out of touch for not seeing it much earlier.

In a world of nothing but bad choices, having the person potentially not attributed to a legit click is worse than overcounting clicks and click rates. For that, I will pull a report and understand our avg/median number of false clicks as a % and then manually apply that to reporting as the "estimated real clicks".

It makes me feel lied to over these past years and it will not look good on long term reporting when suddenly clicks are dropped by 20%. Because that is close to how many clicks we're seeing as not human.

This one will be hard to solve.

[Joelle_Andrews]

Yeah, we've been dealing with this for a while, but in the last few weeks we've seen a huge spike in fake activity.  Very annoying for us and Sales.

[Chris_Saporito]

Dan this is exactly what we've done since realizing false clicks were such a huge problem, especially when counting them as a response. It cuts out a lot of the headtrash with deceiving email metrics. I'm pretty happy with the results of setting up smart campaigns in that way. Thanks for sharing!

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Chris - yeah, the chances of someone clicking the link in the email and having visited the landing page in the past is probably pretty small.  So you should be OK in that regard.  The other occasional issue I would sometimes come across is the dreaded red squiggly in the value of the landing page.  Some of our users were simply copying/pasting in the URL value.  But just like the "visit web page" filters/triggers, the http/https protocol is not included here.  And since Marketo didn't throw an immediate warning (and allowed the campaign to be activated), it wasn't until a lead tried to run through this did we get notified that there was an issue with the campaign.

One other bit of advice is to also include a "remove from flow" flow step - especially if you have additional processing that takes place in the smart campaign (e.g., setting last touch channel, date, etc. values) - for those that don't qualify for the "visited landing page" choice prior.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

Put your "visited web page" as filters in a separate smart list, with an "in past 46 minutes" constraint, then in your choice, replace them by a if "member of smart list" choice, and that will remove the false positive due to older visits.

-Greg