Sept Release: Shorter URLs affects | Community
Skip to main content
September 12, 2013
Question

Sept Release: Shorter URLs affects

  • September 12, 2013
  • 13 replies
  • 2052 views
In regards to the following update in the September release:
  • Shorter URLs – email URLs have been given a trim to be click friendly to the recipient, while preserving all tracking functionality
Note:  Any link in an email sent out prior to the September release will stop working 90 days after this release
 
We actually see a decent amount of activity trickle in from past emails that have been sitting in someone's Inbox for a few months... even up to a year or more. (Makes sense when you focus on content marketing and people keep these messages or clean out their Inboxs and have a moment of interest due to the value they perceive.) We'd hate to miss out on these chance Opportunities, especially since it's from money/time already invested.

Is there a way to address this problem?
This post is no longer active and is closed to new replies. Need help? Start a new post to ask your question.

13 replies

September 12, 2013
Agreed. We still get clicks every day from newsletters we sent out back in March, April, May, etc. It's going to be chaos for our client relations team to deal with suddenly broken links in old emails that people still use. 
September 12, 2013
I was curious about this too, thanks for the post!
September 12, 2013
We are also concerned with the drop of functional links after 90 days - we have a lot of historical click through that comes in 90 + day
September 12, 2013
The vast majority of email link traffic dies off after three days, based on our analysis. Increasing it to 90 days gives us a large buffer on top of that.

With the new shorter URLs we need to sunset the old style links, both for consistency and because there are some security concerns that had been raised with the old style links.
September 12, 2013
Appreciate the response Erik, but that doesn't really address the concern at hand. We're talking about the actual value of post 90-day activity we are getting from many months or even years of distributed email content. Will Marketo consider extending the 90 day period?
September 12, 2013
We also have traffic from emails sent many months back.  I'm concerned about the 90 days as well.

September 13, 2013
We too would like to see it increased by a few months.
Also, what would happen if someone clicked on an old link? A 404 error, a redirect somewhere - this is not explained at all. 
September 16, 2013
We echo the concern of lost oppurtunities here.
September 17, 2013
We are DEEPLY concerend and have spoken with Marketo support about this.
From our point of view - 90 days is an unacceptable period; we are concerend that people click on links in old email messages and land on a 404 error page.
September 17, 2013
I echo the concerns of some other customers above. We have some emails where this won't affect much, but we have some other emails whereby we'd like the links to stay active for longer than 90 days.

Question for an employee: If we go back into a current email (say in our engagement/nurturing program), can I update all links, save the draft, and it'll now have the short URL? I'd hate to see this mess up the 9 emails already in our nurture/engagement stream. Thanks!