Reduce the length of Marketo tracking codes

As one of Marketo's deliverability specialists, I urge you not to use bit.ly links in your email. At this time, bit.ly is listed on Spamhaus and SURBL, two of the most respected blacklists in the world. Using a bit.ly link in your email will cause some emails to be rejected or placed in the spam folder.

Unfortunately, I don't have a better recommendation at the moment. Email shortening services are considered highly suspect by the antispam community, in part because the links can be changed at any time.

This means that you can create an email with a shortened URL that goes to a reputable link and send your email, wait 30 minutes for the messages to clear spam filters and deliver to the inbox, and then change the linked location to a fraudulent site or a site that installs malware or something. While we don't suspect a Marketo customer would ever do this, there is no way for an antispam system to check shortened URLs except at the time of delivery, so this becomes an extremely risky proposition for email security teams.

At the moment, your options are to use a shortened link and lose a little deliverability, or to use an untracked link to a specific Marketo landing page or other page tracked with the Marketo Munchkin tracking code.

Hopefully we will have a solution integrated in Marketo soon.

In the meantime, you can always use the Google URL builder http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 to tag it with your campaign, medium, etc., and then use http://bit.ly/ to shorten that URL to paste into your emails.  It's a few extra steps, but if you have a really long URL and want it to be pretty (like in text-version emails), that works fine.

 I agree! Short URLs are the way to go!!

 Agree the URL needs to be MUCH shorter and much more logical. It doesn't look great when sharing a link to our newsletter with third parties.

If the shorter url can still provide tracking -I'm all for it... but I can't give up my results just to make it look pretty:)

NA

 +10 for the URL shortener.

Pro
* Prevents folks from removing my URL parameters and going direct to the LP, thereby losing tracking info
* Looks pretty

Con
* Not as easy for marketers to skim to make sure they're using the right link, might mix up links within a campaign, would rely on using URL shortener rather than just making a quick update in the email or other campaigns

 mk.to is taken but mrk.to is still available. or even marke.to - only $193 for 2 years...

I think a URL shortener built in is probably going to be a reality in 2011.  I personally hate the long urls too.

 What do people think of url shortener built into Marketo's platform?  Like Bitly but professional.