If your email metrics look too good to be true they probably are.
Marketing teams everywhere are seeing inflated open and click rates thanks to security bots. These bots skim email content scan links and pre click URLs before a human ever sees the message leaving you with fake engagement misleading dashboards and campaigns that look like they are performing better or worse than they actually are.
The good news: Marketo gives you built in tools to detect and filter bot activity so you can get real numbers you can trust.
Here is how to turn them on and what is happening behind the scenes when you do.
Where to Find Bot Activity Settings in Marketo
- Go to Admin.
- On the left hand navigation bar click Email.
- At the top click the Bot Activity tab.
These settings determine how Marketo identifies logs and filters suspicious email opens and clicks.
Method 1 Match With IAB Bot List
The Interactive Advertising Bureau IAB UA IP list is one of the most widely used industry standards for identifying bots. It includes known bot user agents and IP ranges used by security scanners crawlers and automated systems.
What this setting does
If an email open or click comes from a user agent or IP address on the IAB list Marketo, will flag the activity as bot driven.
Your options
You can choose to:
- Log Bot Activity keep the activity in your system but mark it as bot, or
- Filter Bot Activity suppress these events so they do not inflate your metrics.
If you want clean data in reporting nurture scoring lifecycle funnels and behavioral triggers choose Filter.
Method 2 Match With Proximity Pattern
This method catches the bots that are not on the IAB list including aggressive corporate spam filters that pre scan links or open emails automatically.
How Marketo detects non IAB bot behavior
- Marketo compares multiple attributes
- Lead ID must match
- Email asset must match
- Activity type open or link click
- Time difference less than one second
Bots fire actions instantly. Humans do not.
If two or more activities happen at the exact same moment, Marketo flags them as suspicious.
Example scenario:
A lead opens an email.
Zero seconds later three different links are clicked.
The actions happen faster than human behavior allows.
Marketo marks them as bot activity.
Again you can choose to
- Log Bot Activity
- Filter Bot Activity
What You Will See in the Activity Log
When these features are enabled Marketo automatically adds two attributes to email open and link click activities.
Bot Activity
True activity was identified as bot
False Marketo reviewed the activity and determined it was human
Empty activity happened before bot filtering existed
Bot Activity Pattern
IAB List
Proximity Pattern
NA
Empty for older data
This makes it easier to audit behavior and build reports that fully exclude bots.
Why You Should Turn These On Today
Your email program depends on accurate data.
- Engagement scoring
- Trigger campaigns
- AB test analysis
- Deliverability monitoring
- Intent based outreach
- Executive reporting
- Benchmarking over time
Bot clicks and opens warp all of it.
Filtering bot activity in Marketo ensures:
- Your click to open rates are real
- Your nurture and scoring flows behave correctly
- Marketing and Sales are not attributed fake signals
- Your reports do not spike every time a security scanner gets nosy
- Your stakeholders trust your data
Bottom line You do not want to make decisions using bot-made numbers.
If you are tired of second guessing open rates chasing false engagement signals or explaining to leadership why your metrics suddenly look bizarre, turn on Marketo’s bot filters both of them.
It takes two minutes, and the payoff is clean, trustworthy data for everything else you do.