Question
How do I include contact data in a URL? I'm using a tag just like we would to display the data in a Template, but it's not showing up in the URL.
Answer
In order to pass contact data in a URL, use the %%STOP%% tag. Without the %%STOP%% tag, data not be populated in the URL because of the order of process of Templates. URLs are changed to tracked links, and then contact data tags are populated.
Since the URL is converted first, the contact data tag is no longer visible to the system when that replacement happens. For instance, you may submit the contact's first name to some web page: http:// www.mysite.com/home?name=%%$first%%
Tracking links are prepared and converted when a campaign is deployed. Any personalization is ignored in the stored URL to prevent creating a new tracking URL for every contact in the campaign. For example, when the URL above is converted to a tracked link, it resolves to: http:// www.mysite.com/home
To address this, you can use the %%STOP%% tag, which tells the platform to ignore everything after the %%STOP%% tag when converting the tracking links. For the example above, replace the query character in the URL with the tag: http:// www.mysite.com/home%%STOP%%name=%%$first%%
When your template is converted for the campaign, the platform converts the portion before the %%STOP%% tag to a tracked link. The portion after the %%STOP%% tag remains as is to be filled with the contact's unique information: http://[Base URL]/t?r=2&c=28402&l=275&ctl=1B41B:6A48E4CE01C98&name=myName
Where [Base URL] is the domain used for tracking in your realm. You can also replace a forward slash character as follows: http:// www.mysite.com/home/contactus/email=%%$email%%
to: http:// www.mysite.com/home%%STOP%%contactus/email=%%$email%%
which is converted to: http://[Base URL]/t?r=2&c=28402&l=275&ctl=1B41B:6A48E4CE01C98/contactus/email=subscriber@domain.com