As one of Marketo's deliverability specialists, I urge you not to use bit.ly links in your email. At this time, bit.ly is listed on Spamhaus and SURBL, two of the most respected blacklists in the world. Using a bit.ly link in your email will cause some emails to be rejected or placed in the spam folder.
Unfortunately, I don't have a better recommendation at the moment. Email shortening services are considered highly suspect by the antispam community, in part because the links can be changed at any time.
This means that you can create an email with a shortened URL that goes to a reputable link and send your email, wait 30 minutes for the messages to clear spam filters and deliver to the inbox, and then change the linked location to a fraudulent site or a site that installs malware or something. While we don't suspect a Marketo customer would ever do this, there is no way for an antispam system to check shortened URLs except at the time of delivery, so this becomes an extremely risky proposition for email security teams.
At the moment, your options are to use a shortened link and lose a little deliverability, or to use an untracked link to a specific Marketo landing page or other page tracked with the Marketo Munchkin tracking code.
Hopefully we will have a solution integrated in Marketo soon.
I agree, the links are way too long. I know our staff will all freak out (we are transitioning from another service who's tracking links were MUCH shorter). Another comment: A different idea had been merged with this one (https://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000HTNXAA4).
And that is one I REALLY need. If I include a link to www.mysite.com/how-to-do-xyz.html, Marketo appends that URL with a huge long string. I don't want users to see that crazy string...especially if we eventually want them to share the page with colleagues or via social media. How can we hide that?
We've had several comments that the tracking links are so long in Marketo that it puts people off clicking them because they know something fishy is going on. Given that bit.ly and t.co can use only about 10 digits why do we need a gazillion?! lol
Here is a link from a marketing email I received as a user; one and a half links of tracking link:
And here's the link I have to send to my customers; quite a difference; 8 lines of tracking links!
Any update on where we are with this? Would be great to also enable tracking in text emails with those shortened URLs at the same time - I assume the length of these emails as shown above are the main reason why text emails in Marketo currently don't allow any click tracking at all.
We're still working on some other big changes to our back end email infrastructure. Once those changes are complete in the coming months, we'll have more resources available to make other email related changes.
Thanks for checking in, Joel. It's not complete yet, but our engineers are in the process of working on it. I'm not sure when this will be complete because the issue is more complex than it might look at first, but there is active progress and code on it, so it's on its way.
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