Last year, bad bots made up just over 25 percent of all website traffic. These bots can wreak havoc on your marketing automation system, from skewing activity tracking and reporting to generating false positive qualified leads. And, until now, most marketers have had limited options in rooting out that bad bot behavior: either put your forms behind a service like Recaptcha (which can impact form conversion) or attempt to identify bots by trying to spot unusual, non-human behaviors (which has limited accuracy). Neither is ideal.
As bots get more sophisticated, so must our marketing automation platforms. Now, for the first time, Marketo users have a systematic way to filter out bot behavior on form fills and email activity with its new bot filtering features.
To say that I and many other Marketo system admins out there are excited about this simple, yet powerful functionality would be an understatement. Let’s take a look at what these new features can do.
Feature #1: Email Bot Activity
There is a pervasiveness of email tools, especially in B2B environments, that validate the content of inbound emails prior to releasing them to the end recipients. While this protects a company’s internal servers and data, this type of automated bot behavior often skews email opens and click rates for hardworking marketers trying to assess email campaign performance.
Marketo’s new Email Bot Activity feature eliminates tracking and counting bot behavior in email performance reports and record activity history. This means performance reporting, smart list filtering, and processes that trigger based on email behavior — such as global interesting moments and interest scoring — become more accurate.
System administrators can easily turn this feature on in the Email settings in the Admin section of Marketo:
Feature #2: Reject Invalid Checksum Values
Previously, to sniff out bot behavior on a form submission, a hidden honey pot field would be added to the form. Since someone literally couldn’t see the field when manually filling out the form online, if the field was checked in the form submission, it was considered safe to assume that a bot submitted the form.
Marketo’s new Reject Invalid Checksum Values feature validates and rejects form submissions that align to commonly used bot methods. Activating this feature should greatly reduce the amount of junk data coming into form fills and improve the quality of the leads you are sending to sales. A win-win for everyone involved — well, except the bots!
System administrators can find this gem of a feature in the Treasure Chest in the Admin section:
Get ready for more accurate reporting
It’s important to keep in mind when turning on these new features that, depending on how much untraceable bot behavior was happening before, you may see some noticeable drops in email activity and form fill behavior. But don’t panic. It’s far better to have this level of accuracy in tracking to drive confidence in the system and realistically identify who is engaging with your marketing efforts.
So, now all that’s left for you to do is activate these great new features and say buh-bye to those pesky bots. If you’d like to learn more about these and other features in Marketo’s latest release, watch the recording of their May 2021 Release Innovations webinar. And if you’d like to further optimize your Marketo system setup and to take advantage of these features and more, BDO Digital is here to help.
Nova Kopitar is a demand generation expert, specializing in results-focused lead management, nurturing, and scoring. As a DemandGen Senior Solutions Architect, she works closely with clients in areas including program alignment, nurture development, relationship management, resource planning, reporting and more. She is Marketo Business Certified and Technical Certified.
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