Personalizing Content with Offline PURLs/Vanity URLs

[Griffin_LaFleur]

Hey everyone! Looking around to see if anyone has any experience with a scenario I am coming up on. Trying to do some ABM offline, directing traffic to a LP with personalized content based on the unique Vanity URL someone is given (offline). We bought a domain that we wanted to use to create good looking vanity URLs that would essentially redirect to a LP in Marketo and display personalized content to that person. This is to avoid creating many different LPs for them, and not having to use the long Marketo LP URL, even though we can use PURLs to make that URL customized (just doesn't look as good on a handwritten card).

Problem is, we can only redirect the root domain we purchased, and not pass through the Customized URL path to the PURL which would then dictate the content a user sees. For example: Vanity URL > PURL > Marketo LP Personalized Content. The way I understand it, we either have Marketo PURLs as the offline URL and get LP personalization, OR we use Vanity URLs that look nicer and don't get LP personalization.

End Goal: Give target prospect a unique URL that they visit manually, and receive a customized LP experience based on who they are/what company they work for. Many different URLs to one LP with many different versions of the content.

Does anyone know if the domain purchase path was wrong and we should have used Bitly or Rebrandley for the vanity URL associated to the PURL and still get the personalized content from the LP?

Looking for any service that can help us with this, happy to answer any clarifying questions.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Define "look nicer". A Marketo pURL can look like

examp.ly/my/a9s7g

Your link shortener might do

examp.ly/a9s7g

Is that the difference you're trying to control?

[Griffin_LaFleur]

Yea, sorry. I meant instead of:

examp.ly/my/a9s7g (OR "go.ourdomain.com/my/a9s7g")

We purchased a domain that would read more relatable to the prospect industry with name.

prospectindentifier.com/first-last

I guess when I say look better, I don't just mean cleaning up paths, but a more relatable domain. That was the initial intent at least, but seeing that we cannot redirect that purchased domain and pass through the path to a pURL.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, you can use any domain in Marketo, so the hostname wouldn't be a decision point.

First name + last name isn't a unique identifier, though. You must prepare for a tiebreaker (autoincrementing integer, for example).

If you prepare a list of <your unique code> → <Marketo Unique Code> mappings in advance, then I don't see why you couldn't run that via an intermediate rewriting gateway.

[SanfordWhiteman]

And come to think of it, you could even have this "gateway" be a hidden Marketo form, so no other infrastructure required to map from friendlier unique code → Marketo Unique Code. Although if you have more than say, 50 mappings it could become difficult to maintain them in the Form Editor (you'd be reusing the Advanced Thank You Page functionality).