This suggests to me that the click would have been legitimate. Suggests, yep, but doesn't confirm. As a developer, I can tell you that a scanner skipping over "invisible" pixels is child's play. We're not talking about simple scripts that copy out all the links and follow 'em out of context. The sophisticated mail scanners are in fact headless browsers like the ones we use for testing web apps. They render the email as it would be rendered for a human. Since emails are old-fashioned static HTML, figuring out the final layout is very simple. Finding and skipping those links that would be invisible to a human is easy. Remember that in the past year we've already seen scanners evolve from not following JS redirects to generating Visit Web Page activities! They are going way past just simulating the first click to simulate the full browser experience. The only thing I can think of is if the person forwarded the email to someone else and that person clicked. The tracking on the link would be unique to the original lead, so even if someone else clicked it, Marketo would register the click to the first person. Is there any other scenario that might see this happen as well? If a message is forwarded and clicked, like you said, the click will naturally be attributed to the lead for whom the link was personalized. All Clicked Link activities either result from human activity (true "clicks" from pointing devices or keyboard) or automated GETs by a non-human scanner.
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