Implementation of Accurate Email Click Thru Tracking

iMotion Data is a reseller of data storage products. We conduct email campaigns to IT personnel to identify prospects for the products we sell. Prospects are identified in two simple ways; 1) we receive a handful of direct email reply backs from recipients expressing interest in the product we have promoted in the campaign, 2) contacts will click thru a link in the email note taking them to our web site where they can access a PDF about the product (registration not required). Our sales team calls these click thru prospects to ascertain their interest in the product. Current problem - we are experiencing a high percentage of false positive click thru's. Upon contacting the click thru prospect via phone we are told by the prospect that they never downloaded a PDF re the product promoted via the email campaign. Our current email marketing solution is comprised of: 1) a number of servers housed at different hosting providers, we have installed Postfix on these servers, 2) a bulk mail product that our mail lists are upload to and that connects to these remote servers, 3) custom click thru tracking code in the email notes. The code is embedded at the end of the url that takes the recipient to our web site where they can access a PDF. Our link tracking code is rather simple, as all link tracking code we believe is (not rocket science) so we do not believe our current tracking code is the source of this problem. Our click thru reports contain the email addresses of the contacts and we manually search for the contacts full information in the list that we mailed to that day. We will send no more than 10,000 mails per day thru a specific mail server. Our list is 95% accurate, meaning that when our salespeople call a click thru prospect the person answering is indeed the correct person they are attempting to reach...95% of the time. We are seeing that the majority of the false positive click thru’s are employees of large companies which will have deployed layers of security and spam filtering systems. We believe that the false positive clicks are being auto-generated by spam filters as they scan the url embedded in our emails, but we are not certain of that as we do not even know if a spam filter or other security product can actually auto-generate a click thru. If yes, we would like to implement a solution to this problem. If the answer is no, we would also like to implement some solution to diminish the number of false positive clicks we are experiencing. One solution we have thought about – assuming this is possible from a technology standpoint – is to place our tracking code up at our web site vs. in the emails we are sending out. The recipient would click on the link taking them to our web site where they will find a message prompting them to click a button to obtain instant access to the PDF. The tracking code would be installed underneath that button. Assuming there is a way for tracking code implemented at a web site to call back the email address of the contact who is clicking that button. In this way we would know that a live person actually clicked the button vs. a machine. Another idea is to use Google Analytics tracking code vs. the custom code we are now using (in the body of the email). Perhaps if a spam filter recognized the Google url it would not auto generate a click, and an additional benefit is that the spam filter would more often than not pass the email to the recipient vs. blocking the email since it recognizes the Google url. We are seeking a technical consultant who can identify the source of these false positive click thru’s and provide a solution to the problem.