9 Replies Latest reply on May 11, 2018 10:25 AM by Phillip Wild

    Regular and consistent "malformed links"

    Phillip Wild
    Phillip Wild Dec 29, 2017 7:18 AM

      Hi everyone

       

      Each week, we send an email newsletter to our database. The US very consistently shows about 200ish "malformed links" in the email performance report. Each week we will see a similar amount.

       

      Support has said that this is the result of something (automated or otherwise) messing around with the Marketo tracking links, but I was hoping someone could shed a bit more light on which email providers might be doing this, and if there is anything we can do. Since there are 200ish links, it's something like 10% of our weekly clicks in that week. I'd love to know where those people clicked.

       

      Thanks!

        • Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
          Sanford Whiteman
          Sanford Whiteman Dec 29, 2017 11:03 AM (in response to Phillip Wild)
          Support has said that this is the result of something (automated or otherwise) messing around with the Marketo tracking links

          I don't fully buy this explanation (which is echoed in a Marketo support post).

           

          It's absolutely true that mail security software rewrites links (which have already been rewritten by Marketo). So you might have http://www.example.com/landingpage rewritten to http://click.example.com/12qf832akadsf for click-tracking purposes when it's sent out, then rewritten again by the recipient's mailserver to http://mailprotect.mycompany.com/protected/453jnge872356t?thengoto=http://click.example.com/12qf832akadsf.

           

          The lead will see the http://mailprotect.company.com/... URL in their inbox.  And it's certainly possible that if the http://click.example.com/... URL is long, the MailProtect URL may end up truncating the original http://click.example.com/... URL that's encapsulated inside the MailProtect URL.

           

          But that doesn't explain how the lead could register a Clicked Email in the correct campaign yet have the URL reported as malformed.  Try truncating a Marketo click tracking URL by trimming off the last alphanumeric character. Chances are 99.9999% you'll get a 404 error with "The redirect URL is empty."  And I have no reason to believe that this type of "malformed URL" gets logged to the correct campaign -- rather, it doesn't get logged anywhere at all.

           

          So I'd instead be looking into links that were malformed from the start -- I know you use Velocity, so have you exhaustively tested for exceptions (null values, missing array indices, etc.)?

            • Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
              Phillip Wild
              Phillip Wild Jan 2, 2018 12:47 PM (in response to Sanford Whiteman)

              Great thoughts Sanford.

               

              There is always a possibility of the Velocity scripts doing something funky. But...my gut feel is that this shouldn't be a problem in the send where the malformed links are being registered.

               

              Our newsletter has some scripts in it, but they only affected the footer, and a minor story in the middle. There's no way these pieces could account for anything like the volume of link clicks that appear to be malformed. It seems more like the number of clicks we would get to a featured story somewhere up the top - which are all static pieces of HTML.

               

              Having said that, your explanation makes a lot more sense than anything else. So I'll do some digging when I get a chance. Thanks again!

              • Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
                Phillip Wild
                Phillip Wild Jan 5, 2018 6:48 AM (in response to Sanford Whiteman)

                Thinking about it....could I run a smart list based on "clicked link is malformed link"? Or something similar? To try and find the specific leads that clicked the link?

                 

                If that's possible, then I could theoretically click every link sequentially from my profile and see which one turns up as a "malformed link" in my activity record.

              • Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
                Christina Zuniga
                Christina Zuniga Champion May 11, 2018 10:00 AM (in response to Phillip Wild)

                I had this happen a few years ago. It was mailto links that had tracking checked - it appended tracking code to the end of the the email address and showed up in reports as a malformed link.