Tracked links are not redirecting to the URL in the HTML content

[jmeilan]

Hi,

I recently started working on an Adobe Campaign Classic V7 instance that was already setup.

I encountered some unexpected behaviour doing some testing where I configured a simple email with multiple links that are being tracked by ACC. One of the links points to google.com, this one in particular works fine. The other links point to one of our brands website (brandA.com).

The problem is that when the email is sent and the links are being tracked, the brandA.com links do not redirect to the brandA website at all but rather a brandB website homepage. I checked the click formula, typologies, analytics account and so on to check if some transformation was being done there but no luck. I also wanted to access the tracking server to check the tracking XML file but unfortunately the instance is hosted by Adobe and I can't do it myself.

Has anyone encountered something similar? I suspect it is some kind of configuration in the tracking server to avoid links from certain domains. I'm happy to provide more details if needed.

Thank you and kind regards,

Jose

[isahore]

Hi @jmeilan,

Did you check the nms:trackingUrl schema for the source URL of those tracked URLs which are not working as you expect? Is it the same URL that you configured or the other one?

[jmeilan]

Hi @isahore,

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, I did check the source URL in nms:trackingUrl. In fact, I checked the tracking url IDs (broadLog, delivery and url) and all of them are correct. The source URL is what I expect it to be.

I suspect that there may be some kind of process making the change of the URL directly in the tracking server but I can't access the tracking log file to check.

[isahore]

Hi @jmeilan, check for any redirects happening in the interim using any of the online tools available.

Is it a prod or a non-prod environment?

[jmeilan]

Hi @isahore, I also did a trace URL yes and the tracked url is giving a 302 response code to the brand B website and then a 301 redirect to that same website. The url in step 2 and 3 are the same, and there's no trace of the original URL.

This same behaviour is happening for both Staging and Production instances, so it's something that was setup on purpose.

[jmeilan · Accepted solution]

After some investigation by Adobe Support, there's apparently a configuration file in the Apache servers that controls whitelisted domains. If a domain is not whitelisted, a default URL is shown.

In my particular case, I had to add the domain for my website in that configuration file of the tracking server and restart the apache. Once that was done, the redirection was done correctly.

I'm not sure if this is something custom for my instance but thought it would be good to share here.