Marketo adding content to links; breaking them

Anonymous · ‎06-13-2018

Hello everyone,

We’re having an issue with our links, where Marketo is adding to our URLs and sending users to a 404 page. The links which are breaking are pulling in a custom token based on the individual user, while our other links are working fine. We’ve also disabled link tracking.

Here’s what the link should look like:

www.lucidchart.com/users/acceptFreeMonthInvitation?token={{lead.Invitation URL}}

Here’s the link when sending a sample or live email:

http://www2.golucid.co/index.php/email/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.lucidchart.com/users/acceptFreeMonthInvitation?token=MTllOWU5YTI4NmY1NzFhMzJiNzY2MzEzNmVj...

The broken links lands to a 404 page. Removing the text highlighted in red directs to the correct url. These links are used in our critical transactional emails and we’re seeing a lot of errors for our users. Is this a known bug and is there a known fix? Has anyone else encountered this?

Anonymous · ‎06-14-2018

Here's the solution I found after much digging. These emails are built using Marketo templates, and Marketo was adding curly quotes which were visible in the code, but weren't visible in the GUI.

So the link in the raw Marketo code should have looked like this: href="${ctaLink}"

But because of an apparent bug in Marketo the link looked like this: href="“${ctaLink}""

Any link which had the additional quotation marks was broken, but once those were removed the links work perfectly.

View solution in original post