If you work in email marketing, you know the constant challenge of getting through uninvited guests, aka “bots,” and avoiding interference from security filters.
Recently, we reactivated an old smart campaign in Marketo for a client. It was a simple setup, which involves awarding 5 points for each email click. But within hours, some contacts had logged over 60 clicks on a single message. What should have been a minor engagement signal turned into scoring chaos, misfired alerts, and team confusion.
This wasn’t just a one-off glitch. It highlighted a much bigger issue: bots are getting smarter, but many platforms—including Marketo—haven’t evolved to keep up. The result? Bot activities are misread as real engagement, and marketers are left cleaning up the mess.
Read on to see what went wrong, why it matters, and how to avoid similar issues in your own campaigns.
One of the most frustrating challenges in email marketing today is automated bots that behave like real users messing up your open and click-through rates without any actual human interaction.
These bots are designed to simulate engagement, mainly for security purposes. They click on links, follow redirects, load scripts, and even interact with landing pages in ways that look nearly identical to a real person. In many cases, this behavior is part of broader systems testing or monitoring activity, not a deliberate attack. But the result is the same: distorted email marketing metrics and misleading signals.
As these bots become more sophisticated, it’s harder than ever to distinguish what's human from automated activity. What used to be a reliable click or visit might now be just noise.
For marketers, this means traditional metrics like email clicks can no longer be taken at face value. Without adjusting tracking methods and logic, campaign data becomes unreliable, scoring systems misfire, and teams risk wasting time chasing phantom leads. As bots continue to evolve, so must the strategies and tools we use to ensure that what you see is actually what you get.
Click tracking has long been a fundamental part of email marketing performance and lead scoring, but in today’s environment, it’s becoming increasingly unreliable. Many platforms still treat every click as a sign of human engagement, without distinguishing between real users and automated bot activity.
It’s worth noting that bots aren’t just malicious actors. Many are legitimate systems that scan emails and links for a variety of purposes: malware detection, analytics, compliance, or quality checks. For example, email security software often triggers every (or random) link in an email to ensure it’s safe. But this is just one part of the problem.
Other bots are even more advanced. They follow redirects, load external scripts, and interact with landing pages, often triggering JavaScript-based tracking and inflating click metrics. This behavior is especially common in B2B contexts, where corporate domains rely on sophisticated security systems that include multiple layers of automated scanning.
That said, the impact on marketers is significant:
To address this, use “clicked link in email” triggers cautiously, limiting them to once per day if needed. Instead of relying solely on clicks, consider landing page visits as a more reliable sign of real engagement, since bots are less likely to simulate full browsing behavior. You can also track multiple visits by setting up separate smart campaigns, giving you better control over how engagement signals are interpreted. Ultimately, as bot activity grows more sophisticated, marketers must adjust their strategies to ensure their systems respond to genuine human engagement and eliminate the noise.
As email bots become more advanced, legacy campaigns built in tools like Marketo are struggling to keep up. What once worked reliably can now lead to inaccurate data, misfires in automation, and wasted effort. Here's how this played out in a real scenario—and why it matters.
When we reactivated an older smart campaign, it performed exactly as originally designed. The problem? That logic was never built to handle today’s automated traffic. In a bot-heavy environment, what used to be reliable is now a liability.
Other marketing platforms have added features to filter and flag bot activity. Marketo, however, has remained largely the same. Without custom solutions, its users are increasingly exposed to unreliable data and flawed campaign performance.
To maintain reliable data in platforms like Marketo, marketers need to rethink their approach:
Marketo has taken steps to help marketers identify bot-driven engagement in email activity. Two primary methods are used to detect potential bot clicks and opens:
These updates add useful context to each engagement and help identify likely bot activity and how it was detected. While this approach helps surface suspicious behavior, it’s important to note that detection applies only to new data and filtering is still a manual process. Marketo gives teams visibility, but it’s up to marketers to decide how to interpret and act on that data.
For teams focused on improving data quality and lead scoring, these tools are a step in the right direction. However, it may still be worth evaluating whether your current setup fully supports your long-term marketing goals.
As email engagement data becomes harder to trust, it’s clear that traditional tracking methods alone aren’t enough. This creates major challenges for marketers who rely on accurate engagement data to assess campaign performance, score leads, and make decisions. That said, many modern email marketing platforms are stepping up with better tools to filter out bot activity and preserve data integrity.
Modern platforms implement advanced automated bot detection and filtering, helping separate human interactions from those triggered by automated systems. These systems often use a mix of techniques to identify and filter out non-human interactions. IP filtering is used to exclude clicks coming from known data centers or internal scanners. Behavioral analysis helps flag interactions that happen too quickly or follow patterns that don’t align with normal human behavior. In addition, many platforms use heuristics and machine learning to continuously adapt and improve bot detection.
HubSpot, for example, automatically detects and filters bot activity at the platform level. It analyzes interaction patterns, IP ranges, and user behavior to determine if an activity came from a real user or an automated system. This helps keep reports accurate, improves lead scoring, and reduces false clicks without needing manual setup.
To alleviate concerns about bot activities, it automatically filters out suspicious clicks by analyzing IP addresses and user behavior patterns. HubSpot's bot filtering is already active by default, which helps ensure that reported metrics truly reflect genuine human engagements.
HubSpot cuts time spent on false leads and boosts lead quality by filtering out activity that looks like it’s come from a script. The result is cleaner data that supports more reliable lead scoring, better reporting, and smarter campaign decisions.
Recognizing early on that Marketo doesn’t natively filter out bot clicks, at SR Professional Marketing, we developed a workaround called “Honeytrap” some time ago to help fill that gap before bot activity became the widespread issue it is today.
Honeytrap uses a hidden link embedded in your email templates, combined with smart campaigns that monitor click behavior and flag suspicious activity. When applied consistently across campaigns, it enhances lead scoring logic and improves overall data reliability.
And, while it doesn’t solve all of Marketo’s limitations, this simple solution has helped our clients stay ahead of data issues by reducing bot noise and improving campaign clarity.
We’re not saying Marketo no longer works. Marketo remains a powerful tool, but for many marketing teams, the effort required to maintain accuracy is becoming unsustainable. As marketing environments evolve and bots get smarter, the need for cleaner, more reliable data has never been greater.
Here are signs it might be time to reassess:
Take a step back and ask: is your current platform truly supporting your marketing goals—or are you spending more time supporting the platform itself?
Bot filtering isn’t foolproof (bot detection will never be 100% accurate). Moreover, when it comes to driving real marketing ROI, it's only one part of a much bigger picture. If your engagement metrics are distorted or your campaigns aren’t performing the way they should, it’s time to take a closer look.
Start by auditing your smart campaigns and lead scoring logic to identify where false signals might be slipping through. Small changes here can prevent bigger issues down the line.
If maintaining clean, reliable data feels like a constant uphill battle, it may be worth exploring platforms better equipped to address these challenges more effectively. The good news is that lots of modern tools offer smarter automation, built-in protections, and greater efficiency for today’s marketing teams.
Whether you’re enhancing your Marketo setup or exploring new solutions, the key is to future-proof your tech stack with tools and strategies designed for today’s marketing challenges.
Need help cutting through the noise? At SR Professional Marketing, we help teams clean up engagement data and build scalable automation strategies, supporting both those who continue with Marketo and those exploring new solutions like HubSpot. Contact us today to schedule a consultation.