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Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
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.)?
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Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
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!
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Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
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.
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Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
Scott McKeighen Mar 21, 2018 7:56 AM (in response to Phillip Wild)Did you ever track down and solve your Malformed Link problem? We're experiencing the same discrepancy in our more dynamic emails, which leverage velocity to generate links.
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Re: Regular and consistent "malformed links"
Phillip Wild Mar 21, 2018 12:37 PM (in response to Scott McKeighen)Unfortunately not Scott.
We are tracking all clicks in Google Analytics (and lead scoring in Marketo based on page visits), so as long as Marketo is tracking that a link is clicked, it's not the end of the world. We can get the info from other areas. But we still can't solve the problem, or even narrow it down. Baffling.
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