What is the problem?
- Link scanner and click bot are network security devices that enterprise deploys to block links to risky websites. These devices will click on every link within an email you send before the email is delivered to the recipient’s email server.
- This pattern is identified by out-of-sequence email activities in Marketo, namely Click Email happens before Open Email or Email Soft Bounce.
Why does this matter?
- Inflated lead scoring for email click activities
- False MQL resulting in low quality leads sent to sales
How to solve the problem?
- Build a set of jobs to continuously identify all the emails and domains that exhibit the link scanner behavior.
- Automatically tag the lead records in Marketo that use a scanner.
- Automatically populate this list of leads in Marketo as a static list.
- Adjust scoring and MQL programs for leads that use a scanner.
- Adjust email conversion reports accordingly with list of emails and domains that use link scanner.
Activity data preparation Job
- Append Lead ID, Lead Email, Lead Company, and Lead Website to Activity data
- Clean ID, Email, Company Name, and Website data
- Extract Domain from Email and Website
Detect link scanner pattern Job
- Identify link scanner activity patterns
- Count occurrences by email to help build a list based on minimum occurrence threshold
- Count occurrences by domain to help build a list based on minimum occurrence threshold
Set Up Marketo Activity Data
You should already have a Data Source for your Marketo Lead data
Set up a Data Source to import your Marketo Activity Data
- We recommend importing at least 6 months of data
- These activity types are required:
- Click Email
- Email Opened
- Email Delivered
- Email Bounce Soft
Create Activity Preparation Job From Recipe
Navigate to Automation and select Recipes
Activity Preparation Job Details
Create Link Scanner Job From Recipe
Navigate to Automation and select Recipes.
Link Scanner Job Details
Note: This threshold means how many occurrences are needed to consider this a repeatable pattern. This threshold is used to remove one-off glitches in the data.
View List of Emails/Domains That Exhibit This Pattern
Rule 5 output - List of emails (set filter to Duplicate = Surviving Merged)
Rule 6 output - List of unique domains (set filter to Duplicate = Surviving Merged + OP Link Scanner Detection Count threshold)
What to try next:
- Automatically update Marketo lead records with a custom data field “Link Scanner In Use”
- Automatically populate a static list in Marketo with the list of leads using link scanner
- Adjust scoring and MQL programs in Marketo to compensate for link scanner