Have you ever had an uninvited guest show up? In marketing, we call them spambots 🤖. Unfortunately, if you do any work with email, then you know how hard it is to get past spam filters.

One of the most annoying parts of email tracking in Marketo? You guessed it, bot clicks! It’s an ongoing issue that B2B marketers are taking head on with increasing frequency. The result of these bot clicks give false hope to marketers that see a “click” on their email that was never opened by a real person.

While we wait for marketing automation platforms like Marketo to address these issues, what can we do in the meantime? How do we make sure we don’t track them as conversions?

Here are tips:

• Instead of linking people directly to an asset or PDF, send them to a page where they need to click a button to “download.” Another option can be sending them to a form with pre-fill, which will work since you are sending from an email.

*Bonus: a page will also have navigation for extra content browsing/secondary CTA’s.

• Set up the conversion tracking campaign to trigger off of “Clicks Links on Web Page” and/or “Fills Out Form” based on what option you chose.
• If you are using UTMs and want to track “Clicks Links on Web Page” to a specific campaign, make sure you state as a condition on the filter “referrer” containing “utm_campaign=xyz.”

You cannot say “Querystring” contains “utm_campaign=xyz” since it’s looking at the link clicked on a webpage, and not the actual web page link.  

• For those of you who are looking to send someone to a blog or page with no form or button option and can’t implement the options listed above, we suggest triggering off of “Visits Web Page” and filter on clicked in the email you sent. Many bots don’t log a page visit, so requiring a page visit and a click can be a great work around. Still not where we’d like in some small cases where a page visit is logged, but it’s a good compromise.

Spam filter bots are often the culprit for confusion and panic amongst email senders. As enterprise email security clients get more and more sophisticated, these clicks will continue to show up and potentially screw up our conversion reporting, our scoring, and our insights into the true performance of an email. Put these right processes in place and you should have better insight into true conversions for your Marketo emails.