Custom String Field vs Custom URL Field

[Angus_McCann1]

We are capturing a personalized cart abandon URL for a cart abandon email and passing it into a field in Marketo.

My question is do I populate it into a URL field or a String field? Is one better than another for a specific reason? I know when populating a link via a token, in order to have the reporting register the token as a link, we need to leave the protocol (http:// or  https://) outside of the value in the token.

Does capturing the URL in a URL field circumvent this? Do we need to leave off the protocol? Etc I'm just struggling with what the difference is between the URL field and a string and the doc isn't very clear on that.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

If you wish to store only urls in this custom field then I would suggest using URL datatype as with the URL datatype you may store the protocol and use the token for same without pre-appending the protocol like string field. Also the string field has the character limit of 255, this might be bottleneck for larger urls.

[Angus_McCann1]

Awesome! Thank you so much! That's exactly what I was looking for!

[Darshil_Shah1]

Anytime 😉

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Angus_McCann1 look at my updates here, they're very important.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Hard disagree.

You should be using a Textarea field.  URL fields are limited to 255 characters. They are suitable for hostnames but not entire URLs. I wrote a whole blog post about this a few years ago: https://blog.teknkl.com/real-world-marketo-field-limits-2-urls/

[SanfordWhiteman]

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may store the protocol and use the token for same without pre-appending the protocol like string field.

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Incorrect, this only results in an untracked link.

Don't know where this myth came from.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I got it from this official documentation where in it clearly states that URL field can store protocol as well. I am sure that you are right as I might have been seeing the wrong doc altogether! 
apologies for the confusion.

[SanfordWhiteman]

A String field can hold an entire URL including the protocol or not.

The only thing (and it's meaningless) a URL field offers - but only in some contexts - is built-in validation of the URL-like syntax. But anyone can do the same or better validation in client code.

The ability to store a URL is never said in the documentation to do anything for tracking.

[Angus_McCann1]

@SanfordWhiteman So if the link is being generated by a third party WITH the protocol and pushed into our instance with a native integration (as in we cannot intercede and remove the protocol) how would you go about tracking link clicks in an email? Or is there a way that we can remove the protocol?