Let’s save everybody’s bandwidth: stop tracking clicks, but keep Munchkin activities

Face it: even before recent events, click tracking was a flawed-to-useless exercise.

Clicked Email has long been polluted by mail scanner activity, though most people were late to realize it. Now, it’s also actively wasting internet resources that are needed by students, doctors, poor and isolated people, and — to a less moral but nevertheless real extent — by businesses.

So let’s stop sending requests that have a negative return, while keeping the Munchkin sessions that are still integral to journey measurement.

There’s a special trick to doing this in Marketo: the ##MKT_TOK## system variable.

Two easy steps:

1. Disable all tracking on your links, which turns off both Clicked Email and the still-important mkt_tok.
2. Re-enable mkt_tok only by manually adding the variable to your links.

Like so:

Your links will not bounce off the click tracking (“branding”) server, so you won’t see Clicked Email anymore.

But the links still carry lead info to associate Munchkin Visited Web Page and Clicked Link activities.

Now you don’t have to worry about the click tracking server going down under load, which (I kind of buried the lede) has been happening. And not to overstate the moral accomplishment, but it’s a very tiny bit more than zero, maybe?