Pardot is filtering out bot clicks, why won't Marketo? | Community
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Swapna_G
Swapna_G
New Participant
March 10, 2019
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Pardot is filtering out bot clicks, why won't Marketo?

  • March 10, 2019
  • 11 replies
  • 34851 views

Pardot recently announced they are putting several things in place to get rid of bot clicks. One of the simplest ones being IP-based filtering. We have asked Marketo if they could forward the IP address with click data so we could do something about it. Marketo already has this information. Why can't they filter clicks based on IP addresses that many of these security appliances publicise?

Rejecting clicks before the email was even delivered, would be helpful too.

There are some obvious patterns Marketo to look for - like clicks on every single link or multiple links in a very short timespan.

Or clicks that didn't result in a web pageview. We don't have a simple mechanism to link the two, since Marketo doesn't send the clickId to the web pageview. But Marketo has that info.

This is becoming a big problem, since we can't do any lead nurturing or other campaigns due to bots clicking.

Thanks.

Swapna

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    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    New Participant
    March 10, 2019

    "announced" != "successfully implemented"

    Nothing is obvious. What you're referring to as "security appliances" are in fact VMs on cloud and private infrastructure whose IPs are shared by human users. That is the whole idea, to not be able to tell the mail scanners apart from humans. If your infrastructure can distinguish machines from humans, that means the malicious actors can do the same thing, rendering the security layer useless.

    Or clicks that didn't result in a web pageview.

    Correctly operating scanners do result in a pageview.

      Swapna_G
      Swapna_GAuthor
      New Participant
      March 10, 2019

      Sanford,

      I understand not all bot clicks  will ever be caught. We have verified manually in our log files that there are several page views from IP addresses that are Barracuda Email Security Service IP Ranges or for Proofpoint etc. The corresponding clicks were still in Marketo. From the appliance's perspective, it doesn't really hurt them if you recognize their IP addresses, as their job is done, once they inspect your links.  But the harm is done from our perspective, as it inflates the click numbers, not to mention the nurture campaigns are rendered useless.

      Can Marketo either do something to remove these, or provide us the tools like the IP address in click information, or clickID in web view. How is this not a huge concern for anyone trying to do any type of lead nurture or scoring?

      I get your point that "announced is not the same as successfully implemented", but at least Pardot is doing something to address this big problem for the marketers!

      Swapna

      Swapna Gupta
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