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!
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.)?