While Insentric tries to cover as many use cases for appending tracking to email links as possible, we recognize there are situations where you may not want to track certain links automatically. Examples of these might include:
- Links to internal platforms, such as alerts that reference your Salesforce instance
- Links to external partners you do not manage analytics for, such as Qualtrics
- Links where a custom override has been placed on the URL, such as passing specific/different UTM parameters on certain links
In each of these cases (and more!), Insentric has options to help set you up for success by allowing you to screen out certain links.
Method 1: Excluding domains from updates
If you know you have certain domains that should never need updating from the Query Link Appender, excluding them from processing is straightforward. Sign in to Insentric Admin with an administrator account and visit Marketo Configuration → Email Link Appender. There, you will see a field named Excluded Domains.
To enter a new domain to exclude, type in the domain name at the lowest domain level you want to block. For example, entering login.marketo.com would prevent login.marketo.com from being tracked but allow other links, like https://marketo.com, to be appended. Likewise, entering marketo.com will block both login.marketo.com and any other links using the domain. Click the X button next to a domain once entered to remove it or the X button at the end of the dropdown to remove all set domains.
Once you have entered your domains, click "Submit". Your appender will now ignore any domains in this list from being updated.
Method 2: Excluding URLs with manual parameters
There may be situations where you want to override the Email Link Appender depending on what tracking parameters have already been included on a link. For example, if you have a system where you use Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, you may want to prevent any links with a cid parameter being marked up with UTM parameters. Likewise, you may want to manually set certain UTM parameters in certain URLs to override what Insentric calculates by default.
In both cases, setting up exclusions is a quick process. Sign in to Insentric Admin with an administrator account and visit Marketo Configuration → Email Link Appender. There, you will see a field named Excluded URL Parameters.
By default, Insentric suggests each of the five main UTM parameters as potential items to exclude, but you may also type in any custom URL parameters you would like to detect. In the case of the image above, both utm_source and utm_medium are listed as parameters to detect. This means if any links are seen where utm_source or utm_medium are already defined within the URL, it will skip appending those anchor (<a>) tags.
Note: If you define a parameter to exclude link updating from, Insentric will not verify if the combination of URL parameters is valid. For example, with Google Analytics, it is expected that all traffic using URL parameters will always have at least a utm_source and utm_medium parameter set; otherwise, it will fail to record the traffic correctly inside GA. Please be cautious when using this setting.
Once you have entered your exclusion parameters, click "Submit." Your appender will now prevent updating links with parameters in this list.
Method 3: Using the insNoTrack class
In addition to mass-removing certain types of links, Insentric also supports manually overriding link tracking on a case-by-case basis by using the insNoTrack class in HTML to remove it from updating. This method works similarly to using the mktNoTrack class to prevent Marketo from tracking a link in an email.
This method can be directly used while working on any Marketo email. For example, let's say you are adding a link to a text area inside your Marketo email via the editor:
To apply the insNoTrack class, select the link (in this case, "ice cream") and click the link icon in the toolbar, which is third from the right on the top row in this screenshot. When you do this, you will see a modal window open:
When you see this modal, click the "Advanced" tab to get more options, including setting a class name:
In this case, you will set the class to insNoTrack to inform Insentric not to track this link. Click "Apply" to have this update saved. As with mktNoTrack, you may manually define this as a class anywhere within your email's HTML to achieve the same effect.
