Filtering Email Bot Activity Feature V2 | Community
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Sreekanth_Reddy
Sreekanth_Reddy
Employee
March 16, 2022

Filtering Email Bot Activity Feature V2

  • March 16, 2022
  • 33 replies
  • 23263 views

May 2022 release details: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-documents/filtering-email-bot-activity-feature-may-2022-release/ta-p/324860

 

With a focus to address bot's impact on Email engagement, in 2021 we have launched our first version of filtering email bot activities. We have seen that this version of the solution is capturing an average of 2 Million bot activities per week for nearly 1000 Marketo customers. The impact is 3% of all email clicks and opens logged, while the industry average is ranging from 15% to 30%.

 

We got feedback from a lot of customers and from the Marketo community. We have categorized the feedback into the following themes:

 

Themes

Description

More Transparency

The current version identifies the bot and doesn't log activities identified as bots.
Almost every customer and community expressed they would like to log the activities and do their own analysis

More Robust filtering

The current version completely relies on the IAB list and we need to introduce more sophisticated filtering to identify bot activities

More Control

As a customer, I find few user-agents/IPs that are creating bot activities and would like to include them in bot activity filtering criteria



We have been working on enhancing the feature that is more sophisticated patterns and gives more control to customers. As part of this effort, in the March release we have made the following enhancements:

 

  • Now Marketing admins have the option to opt for logging activities that are identified as bot
  • We have added 2 new attributes to email click, email open activities
    • “Is Bot Activity”, is a boolean value (True/False) and will be marked as true if the activity is identified as bot activity
    • “Bot activity pattern”: To highlight the pattern respective activity matched with. In this current release, all activities that are identified as bot will have value “match with IAB bot list”
  • These attributes are available as constraints in filters and trigger of these respective activities i.e Clicked link in email, Clicks link in email

     

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    33 replies

    Sreekanth_Reddy
    Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
    Employee
    August 25, 2022

    Hello Everyone can you please check this post and share your comments - https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/need-your-suggestions-to-add-identified-bot-activity-to-marketo/td-p/328168

      Sreekanth_Reddy
      Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
      Employee
      August 25, 2022

      @carrietaylor IAB list is refreshed first day of every month

        C
        carrietaylor
        New Participant
        August 25, 2022

        @sreekanth_reddy with the release of the Proximity pattern (log mode only) on July 15th, was there also an improvement to the IAB list?  Around July 11th, we saw the number of activities with the IAB pattern list was around 7100.  Now we are seeing around 26,000.  That seems like a pretty significant jump around the time all that was released.

          Sreekanth_Reddy
          Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
          Employee
          August 24, 2022

          @joshua_patnod Awesome! Thank you for the detailed feedback. We are as of now focusing on improving our bot activity detection and post this I will have your reporting feedback as consideration for the roadmap. 😃

          Sreekanth_Reddy
          Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
          Employee
          August 24, 2022

          @carrietaylor IAB list was launched in May 2022 and Proximity pattern (log mode only) - July 15th 

          Joshua_Patnod
          Joshua_Patnod
          New Participant
          August 22, 2022

          Hi @sreekanth_reddy - 

          This new feature is going to be key to weeding out bot activity from scoring related to email opens and clicks so thank you! 

          Are there plans to include the "Is Bot Activity" field as a filter option in email performance reports? Similar to the standard columns for Soft and Hard Bounces, it would be great if a similar column could created for Bot Opens and Bot Clicks. 

          • Marketing Activities - Email Performance Reports
          • Analytics - Email Performance Reports
          • Revenue Cycle Explorer - Email Performance Reports

          Thanks again for the great overview. 

          Josh

          C
          carrietaylor
          New Participant
          August 22, 2022

          When was this newer feature for bot activity rolled out?  We have seen an increase around the week of July 24th for a couple of our newsletters.

          Sreekanth_Reddy
          Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
          Employee
          August 17, 2022

          Hey @katp_marketing_automation , we haven't made any changes to any reporting yet. So, yes all activities will continue to be part of the report but you can consider using new constraints we added at email open and email link click activities.

          K
          katp_marketing_automation
          New Participant
          August 16, 2022

          @sreekanth_reddy  to follow up on some of the previous conversations - if we are logging Bot Activity, do bot clicks show as part of Email Link Performance Reports and Email Program Summary Views? Is there a way to filter them out?

          Katja_Keesom
          Katja_Keesom
          Community Manager
          August 5, 2022

          @sreekanth_reddy there will always be a cut over from the reporting with all bot activities included to the new reporting. In order to understand sudden trend breaches better it would be good to be able to in/exclude the activities flexibly to see whether they are the cause of the change or not. Also, it could be good to understand which customers have active mail scanners to judge behaviour better. Finally, it would be good to analyze the bot activities and make your own judgement on whether it was correctly flagged as such so we can judge which types of bot activities to drop from being logged altogether. Hope this helps.

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