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A
Anonymous
February 18, 2015
Question

Shorten url in dynamic email content

  • February 18, 2015
  • 6 replies
  • 3496 views
I am dynamically populating unique referral URLs in emails and they are big, long ugly strings.  How can I shorten these as I'm populating them into the email?  Basically they are created by my site and then pulled from the database and populated into the email.  I want to shorten them as they go into the emails.   Have you done this?  What service have you used?  How do you implement it?

 
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6 replies

A
Anonymous
February 18, 2015
Catherine,

Have you tried branding your email links? This should help shorten the urls behind a vanity url and is done automatically when the email is sent. Here's the help article:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000LK86CAG

 
A
Anonymous
February 18, 2015
That has already been configured.  Should that shorten ALL urls within the email or just tracking urls?  These are dynamically generated urls that don't have marketo tracking in them.

Thanks!
Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
February 18, 2015
I do know that not all tracking URLs are the shortened variety.  For example, when including a token that contained a URL in an email, the tracking link was much longer than our typical tracking links.
Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
February 18, 2015
Why do you need to shorten your URLs with parameters? Is someone really copying and pasting that? Marketo will wrap that URL in their tracking URl anyway.

The only reason to shorten is to post socially or if you expect people to copy and paste it.
A
Anonymous
March 3, 2016

So marketo then definitely does not have ability to make a vanity url right? we will have to use bitly or other link shortening service if needed? thanks, Noopur

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
March 3, 2016

Right.  But as I mentioned above, a shortened link is not going to appear in the final rendered email, since links are rewritten to go to Marketo's tracking server.  Thus only reason to use a shortener is for additional analytics, not for vanity.  And you also must make sure that the URL shortening service will forward query parameters.  Otherwise the critical mkt_tok will be stripped off, which means you will lose the associated lead.

You really need to be aware of all parts of the tracking ecosystem before adding additional link redirection, or you will cause much more harm than good.

A
Anonymous
February 18, 2015
These are our referral urls so yes, people copy and share them.
SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 19, 2015
@Catherine H Even if URLs are different per lead based on information on the Lead record in Marketo, these "dynamic" URLs will still be wrapped in the tracking URI as @Josh says, provided you add them correctly to the email.

For example, you can add a link http://www.example.com/?ref={{Lead.Referrer}}&utm_campaign=blah&some_other_value=98734987609248756w346&yet_another_value=87468qgfuhf23965823746897 and this will end up as http://click.example.com/K00K4XO00L441qIUv0aP0R0. Maybe you wouldn't call that short per se, and it's not as short as it could be in theory, but certainly shorter than the original.

If you're expecting a super-tiny length like http://click.example.com/ + 5 characters, you're expecting the impossible, since there are finite mathematical limits to how many unique URLs can be represented by shortened (hashed) URLs of a given length.

As long as the URL won't word-wrap I wouldn't worry about people copying and sharing.
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