Email Outcomes on Redesigned JO - Links clicked logic question

We don’t rely on the “Links Clicked” outcome in our dynamic JOs, nor have we used its elder sibling in advanced JO. Bot clicks are a real thing, and using them as the means of determining the journey flow can lead to undesirable outcomes. 

Hi ​@dayn.johnson Thanks for your response, I thought GS had implemented a new tracking mechanism to detect bot open/clicks? We actually saw a pretty significant decrease in open rates after that was implemented. 

Why did GS provide this functionality if this is an issue? I did not see anything in the documentation referring to that. 

Also, what are you referring to “its elder sibling” ?

They have implemented a new tracking mechanism, but the community is still seeing misinformation (example screenshot below from #quickhelp). Now maybe the functionality works more reliably on internal programs… we still don’t want to trust a link click to deliver a different message/trigger a different action when there’s a very real chance the user never actually read the email or clicked the CTA, and it was merely opened by Outlook/iOS/etc.

And the elder sibling was just the similar participant field in advanced JO – we don’t use that, and we still don’t use it in dynamic. 😎

Ok, this is disappointing news. Link click outcomes help reduce the number of emails sent, like webinar invites, after they already registered. 

100%, right there with you ​@mradford!

In our use case, a lot of the links we might use for tracking purposes are shared across far more sources than JO (Marketo, CC, CSM emails, in-app popups/banners similar to PX, etc.) so we aren’t able to rely on a link click as the source of truth. Hence, we typically leverage calculated fields (registration booleans, CTAs, webinar attendance, usage activity, etc.) in our evaluate criteria.

Depending on the use case (typically 1x ad-hoc event emails), I’ve built out merged audiences that look at Email Logs v2 or Email Raw Events to check email activity, or have uploaded exclusion lists based on Salesforce campaign registration info.

A lot of these webinar-type communications (especially those run by marketing) seem to work better run out of systems like Marketo, since they tend to be a bit easier to connect on the backend from my POV.

I just want to add here, that I went ahead and tested the email outcomes logic for links clicked and if any of the provided links are clicked, that results in the Link Clicked path, which I guess makes sense since it allows wildcards.