Automatic GA tagging breaks some urls

Question

we asked Salesforce to activate the automatic tagging for our urls in mails for our business units. But after the activation of the feature (utm_medium, utm_source) some of the links coming from a data extension are broken. It seems that the existing string from the data extension which includes already a parameter/query string separator is not correctly "analyzed".

e.g. the url in DE is kind of

example.com/survey/3pz3qvjcc9hq/start?visitor-contact=28bb345dfqz

When the tagging is applied the email receiver gets the salesforce url which is encoded as

example.com/survey/3pz3qvjcc9hq/start?visitor-contact=28bb345dfqz?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Test_Mail_Monday

The problem is this url is broken because of the 2 query string separators

The only solution which is unfortunately a manual one is to get these special (problematic) strings working by using AMPscript like this to get a correct URL.

%%=RedirectTo(CONCAT('http://',Hotlink))=%%

Anyone has an idea where how the automatic tagging will not break the urls int he data extension. The problem is that I cannot ask our user to type everytime AMPscript as they are not aware about this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I believe this is a limitation of the link tagging feature.

I would recommend that you store the query string parameter in a separate field in the Data Extension so.

+---------------------------------------+-----------------------------+
|                  URL                  |           Hotlink           |
+---------------------------------------+-----------------------------+
| example.com/survey/3pz3qvjcc9hq/start | visitor-contact=28bb345dfqz |
+---------------------------------------+-----------------------------+

And then have something similar like this in your Email

%%=RedirectTo(CONCAT('http://',URL, "&", Hotlink))=%%