Test emails no longer show tracking links?

[Anonymous]

In the past, test emails sent to myself from Marketo would show the tracking links in the emails. This morning, I noticed that this is no longer the case--test emails only show the bare links, and only when the actual campaign is run and the "real" emails are sent do they have the tracked links. I'm not complaining--in fact this is better, so I can more easily check links, and not falsely record clicks for emails--but I wanted to confirm if this is a change others are seeing too.

Example below. Note the links in the red boxes, from mousing over the same link.

Test email:


"Real" email:

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

We did this deliberately. There were some inconsistencies in how we did the link tracking for tests, and we took the opportunity to remove them alltogether.

Should you want to test out the link decoration for tracking, you can send the email via a Single Flow Action or test campaign.

Glad it helps your testing!

[Anonymous]

This is not a good thing. This update did not take into consideration that some web servers don't support URL parameters. Now if we test an email link to a "clean url" that does not support url parameters, the test email will work properly, but when deployed for real, it will be broken. This is a major problem when we work with larger enterprises. Enterprises seem to have the most unique implementations of the technologies used, and I have alreday bumped into several of our partners that don't support url parameters (like the Marketo tracking URLs). We do a lot of business with medium and large vendors and it's hard to tell when a vendor does not support this.

Is there any way to enforce this on the test email? Even if it needs to be enabled by a  system administrator, this would take care of this serious problem.

Thank you,

Rafael

[Anonymous]

Also it totally defies the purpose of "test emails" - if the QA is not testing EXACTLY what is going to be send later than this is actually not a "Test Email" but just a "Content Preview" email. The whole test email functionality because rather useless with this modification. Right now we need to develop a custom process how to catch broken URLs without being able to use the test email functionality: Lot's of overhead that is created for my team now (for more than 30 email campaigns per week).

Please think about the purpose of test emails a bit more and find a way of either not modifying the URLs for the 'real campaigns' or at least making exactly the same modifications to the URLs in the 'test emails'.