I have also experienced this, and while I can't speak to the percentage of clicks that were "false" as I haven't run that full research, it has caused us many issues; Sales reps following up on false leads, bad & misleading reporting, etc. The solution highlighted above is a good one, but as some have noted, bots can also "view webpages." We were also having a hard time when we simply sent people to a pdf from an email. You can't see webpage visits to a pdf, unfortunately. So we implemented a honeypot to our emails. A honeypot is also seen as bait for a bot that humans cannot see or click. We added a 1x1 pixel image that blended into either the header or the footer of our emails and hyperlinked it to a specific page. Now a human cannot see that link and therefore will not click the link, but bots will click every link within an email (as far as I know). We then created a smart list of clicks to that honeypot link, and used that to suppress the bots from reporting, Salesforce, interesting moments, lead scoring, you name it. I've heard back from Sales reps that the leads they are seeing have all improved significantly since we implemented the honeypot.
... View more