Links in emails breaking 3rd party landing pages

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

Recently we've experienced some issues with the way Marketo tracking links interact with 3rd party landing pages. Curious to see if others have experienced these issues as well and what workarounds were available.

As you probably know, Marketo wraps all links in emails by default with a tracking token, and it looks something like this:

http://www.domain.com/page.html?mkt_tok=verylongtokenvalue

The problem with this is that (on multiple occasions recently), this token value broke the 3rd party landing page we were linking to. Now I understand not all web pages are built to handle URL parameters (especially very long ones), but one of the pages was actually a GoToWebinar page, and I was surprised by this.

So far, the only options I'm aware of is the following, and none of them are especially ideal:

• use class="mktNoTrack" in links to take off the wrap - with this method, you'd lose tracking
• test each email through a live smart campaign (Marketo doesn't wrap "send sample" links) and deal with each email on a case by case basis - this method is very time consuming and error-prone
• not do anything different - faster but these recent errors make me very nervous

Have you experienced this? What are you doing to prevent this from happening? Is running every email through a live campaign for testing purposes a common practice?

Thanks in advance.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Charlie,

We run every one of our emails through live campaigns to test for any errors that we might not notice otherwise, but I'll admit, it is very time consuming. 

I could be wrong here, but I believe one of the updates made in the May release was that sample emails are now wrapped so that you can see exactly how the links will behave. Was this something that happened recently, or pre-May release? A sample email (sent with TEST | Subject line) that I got today has wrapped links.

-Dory

[Michelle_Tizian]

Charlie,

We do what you noted above because some of the links we have in our event email links are our event sponsor links.  So we do the following as you suggested and it's a pain to have to remove the notrack link on 1 or 2 links.  But it's better than having a bad link. But we do the below items:

• use class="mktNoTrack" only on the links that break after we run a preflight email test.
• We clone the fixed email of bad links and send it.  

[Anonymous]

Dory, thanks for your response. I sample tested an email to myself and you are right - it did wrap the email with the tracking token.

This might just be a peculiarity with GoToWebinar, but the link with the test wrapper works fine:

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/island/webinar/registration.tmpl?id=130035391&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRomrfCcI63Em2iQPJWpsrB0B%2FDC18kX3RUvIbmdfkz6htBZF5s8TM3DUVNAXrZI70EBSbQ%3D

And the live sends do not (!!!):

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/island/webinar/registration.tmpl?id=130035391&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonvKjBZKXonjHpfsX%2B6u4vW7Hr08Yy0EZ5VunJEUWy2YAETtQ%2FcOedCQkZHblFnVwJSq2zVa8No6YJ

This is immensely frustrating.

Can someone from Marketo please comment?

[Anonymous]

Thanks Michelle. How often do the links break for your emails?

[Anonymous]

Also, another update. I'd originally thought one of the Marketo URLs was too long, and that's what was causing it. Apparently that's not the case as the link below actually works.

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/island/webinar/registration.tmpl?id=130035391&mkt_tok=adfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsafadfasfsaf

Must be something else that's breaking it, but not sure what. This is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

Can someone technical from Marketo please comment please.

[Michelle_Tizian]

@Charlie, we caught the bad link after the first round of email sent, so it doesn't happen all the time.  But it was embarrassing that our sponsor was the one who caught the bad link so we test diligently.  

But I forgot to mention that another link type that breaks for us are redirects, so we no longer use those on our emails.  But that is one crazy long link you have up there, and I thought ours was bad. 

[Justin_Cooperm2]

You can use the "mktNoTok" class on links to still get tracking but just indicate the mkt_tok value should not be appended to the query string.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Justin. Very helpful information that I just learned today.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Thanks Justin.  I didn't know that either.