I had the same issue last week. I sent an email to a small number of people and got a TREMENDOUS response. My instinct was to think "this is too good to be true". Here is my case: I sent an email to 365 people. The monitoring campaign i used to route leads to SFDC is a trigger - clicked link in email and link is ***. 19 people opened the email. However there are over 1300 clicks n the email. Some leads show between 10 to 25 clicks and they never opened the email. To stop the issue i added opened email to the smart list in the smart campaign but the damage is already done on this and I am concerned that we will have issues in other smart campaigns in my instance. Marketo's reply: Just a quick recap, these are definitely coming from security bots on the email server. Remember as more and more emails contain bad links ( and these aren't your emails) the security bots will tighten down on security. Another thing to consider is that, you said this was the first time you were sending out an email that included this third party link. A lot of times security bots will get tripped when an email contains links to a domain name that doesn't match the domain name the email is coming from. The best way to work around this is to include that stealth link some where in the email. This will be a link that is hidden to the human eye but the security bot will see within the code. This way you can build a smart list that says "If the person was delivered this email, opened this email, didn't click that hidden/stealth link but did click the intended link" which will give you the folks who actually clicked the proper link. I had to add an invisible "stealth link" to my email templates near the top of the email so the security bots I was trying to get past hit that link first. Bottom line is that I see an inflated number of clicks due to security bots and the unique links from someone that opened the email is what I have to count on for reporting.
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