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

     

Useful Links:

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    33 replies

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    Darshil_Shah1
    Darshil_Shah1
    Community Manager
    May 16, 2022

    @carrietaylor, I believe this feature went live with this May 2022 Product release, and per this community post by Sreekanth, the proximity pattern matching update is currently being rolled out in phases to the pods to ensure a stable release. Also, the hidden links will not be visible to the end-users/real-humans but will be accessible to the email scanners - hence any traffic/UA/IP clicks on these hidden links will be logged as the bot activities with "Bot Activity Pattern" attribute set as "Match with Hidden Link UA or IP" ("Bot Activity Pattern" is available as a constraint in the open and click activities trigger and filters in the SL). Also, FYR - this is a different bot activity identification method than matching activities against the IAB.

     

    @sreekanth_reddy, please feel free to add/update on my answer above. Thank you! 

      C
      carrietaylor
      New Participant
      May 16, 2022

      @sreekanth_reddy when did the hidden link feature go live?  Also, does it recognize all clicks for that hidden link or only ones from the IAB list?

      And I have noticed that some of my own clicks, that I have done, are being flagged as bot activity due to hidden link.

      Sreekanth_Reddy
      Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
      Employee
      May 12, 2022

      @lsimon You don't need to do any changes to your email. It's done when the email is compiled to send from the backend.

       

      Regarding, will we be able to filter the Bot clicks out of Email Performance reports? -- Currently, there is no inbuilt option for this but you can consider adding constraints of "is bot activity" to your Smartlist rule.

        L
        lsimon
        Employee
        May 6, 2022

        Hi @sreekanth_reddy 

        The Hidden link in emails, is that added to emails automatically, if the logging feature is turned on? Do emails need to be re-approved, re-created to include the link?

        Also, will we be able to filter the Bot clicks out of Email Performance reports?

        Thanks!

          A
          ajavinash
          New Participant
          April 26, 2022

          @sreekanth_reddy - Thank you so much Sreekanth for the detailed description. This is really helpful.

            Darshil_Shah1
            Darshil_Shah1
            Community Manager
            April 18, 2022

            Awesome, thank you for the clarification, @sreekanth_reddy, appreciate it.

            Sreekanth_Reddy
            Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
            Employee
            April 18, 2022

            @darshil_shah1 

            No AI/ML at this point but we are looking into it. Regarding the documentation page, as I mentioned above other two patterns are part of May 2022 release and documentation will be updated accordingly

            Darshil_Shah1
            Darshil_Shah1
            Community Manager
            April 17, 2022

            This is super-helpful, @sreekanth_reddy. Thank you so much! I was also curious about the new filter values.


            Does pattern matching make use of AI/ML capabilities or does it rely solely on the proximity of events to classify bot-like activity?

             

            Also, can we possibly include some details in the Filtering Email Bot Activity documentation page around the new filter values?

            Sreekanth_Reddy
            Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
            Employee
            April 17, 2022

            @tmosco23 Thank you for bringing this up. In the last release, we added an option to opt for logging the bot activities into your Marketo instance. We have introduced new attributes to flag activities as bots or not.  So,

            • Activities that are identified as bots will have "Bot Activity" as "True" and Bot Activity Pattern as "Match with IAB list"
            • Activities that are identified as not bots will have "Bot Activity" as "False" and Bot Activity Pattern as "N/A"
            • Activities that happened before we introduced these attributes will have "Bot Activity" as " " (empty) and Bot Activity Pattern as " " (empty)

            I hope this makes sense. Let me know you comments

              Sreekanth_Reddy
              Sreekanth_ReddyAuthor
              Employee
              April 17, 2022

              @rajnikant-modi Those are the easter eggs for the upcoming release :). Currently, filtering still works based on Match with the IAB bot list. In the next release, we are introducing 2 new ways of identifying Email bot activity. 

               

              • Match with Hidden link UA/IP: We going to a hidden link to your email and capture UA/IP clicks coming from these links. Activities that match with these UA/IPs will be marked as bots
              • Event close to other bot activity or "Proximity pattern": When more than multiple activities happen at the same time they are identified as bots too

              More details will share post-release, but for now as I mentioned filtering is being done only based on IAB list of UA/IPs

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