Tracking links in email script?

[Anonymous]

We have created an email script which creates a newsletter based off preferences users have set in our database. Everything works fine and it organizes content in the email based off preferences, however something seems to have happened where since we have included the email script in the email template we no longer have access to tracking clicks. 

Is there anyway around this?

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Elliot Shmukler​, Can you please message me directly (not in the thread here) with the case # where this info was given? I'd like to follow up with the Support Engineer directly on this to correct that information. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Alexander -

If I understand you correctly, what I think you're saying is that the links you are trying to track are not at all in the email template that you built in the Marketo Design Studio, but actually constructed in an email script token (using Velocity).  This token constitutes the entirety of the body of your HTML message to your leads?

I just checked some of my own messages that I built using the same method and can confirm - the links that you construct (and that Marketo delivers) via the email script token are not encoded for tracking.  Links in the same message that are *not* constructed using an email script token *do* get encoded for tracking.  It appears that Marketo processes links in the *body* of the message for tracking *prior* to interpreting the output of an email script token.

This makes me wonder what happens when you pass just a piece of a link as a token into the body of your message.  If the token is generated via an email script, my guess is that it would fail to be encoded and tracked as well.

Bottom line: I think I get what you're trying to do and there's no way, short of Marketo making a product enhancement, for you to both track your links *and* get the sophisticated level of automation and personalization you want.  The best you might be able to do is to add your own tracking codes to each link (using source and sub-source URL parameters) and track these on a per-person basis in whatever analytics package you use on your website.  At this point, however, any flows you'd like to set up based on click history or advanced reporting that you might try to perform within Marketo are basically dead in the water.

It's increasingly clear to me that there are very few folks (even within Marketo!) who know all the ins and outs of how email script tokens work.  It's been a steep and somewhat painful learning curve for me personally.  I'd like to see more documentation on using Velocity to create email script tokens.  If you (and others reading this discussion) agree, please like the related idea that I posted and add your comments with suggestions on what needs to be documented:

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000JYPuAAO

Thanks,
-patrick 

[Anonymous]

I understand segementations but it would not work for what we want to do, which is to create an email unique to each of our users preferences, based off content on our site (articles). 

We wanted to fully automate the process so no one has to update snippets or anything as we were doing before. It worked, but from what it looks like links are only tracked through what is in the email. In our email is just our email script which contains the html and coding for grabbing and displaying the right content.

Any other thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Links at email template level are not necessarily handled as the regular links added through Design Studio. There is a backgorund process to assemble the final email for each individual recipient.

I agree with Mark, a segmentation would be far more appropriate.

[Anonymous]

Concider using Marketo's out-of-box segmentation for your framework for dynamic content. Here is a link to an overview...With this basic approach you will have no issues with reporitng on engagment.