Marketo Landing Pages vs Internally Hosted Pages

[Anonymous]

I was hoping some more experienced Marketo users may have some feedback on this topic. I am currently working on compiling a list of pros and cons of using Marketo Landing Pages vs. Internally Hosted Pages. 

I know Marketo Pages are simpler to build and get live and create a more agile working environment, plus they will already have necessary tracking links built in. Are there any other key components I’m missing if we were to host pages internally outside of a longer process to build and having to add tracking codes to each page. 

Thanks all! 

[Josh_Hill13]

So usually this is referred to as Marketo Hosted vs. Externally Hosted (or your own website). In general, always host in Marketo.

Benefits of Marketo Pages + Forms:

• easy to churn out
• full form functionality
• easy for marketers to go in and fix

Drawbacks of Marketo Pages:

• SEO may be missing because people forget
• SEO off main domain, but may not be a big deal
• templates can be unwieldy - page layouts need to be simple.
• not synced with main website changes

Benefits of Externally Hosting Pages + Marketo Forms:

• synced with your site design
• connected to your SEO
• you don't have to maintain it
• embed code is easy if you dont require fancy designs

Drawbacks of Externally Hosting Pages + Marketo Forms:

• lose progressive
• can lose prefill in some situations
• need to add CSS and test if you want form to match your site
• harder to manage for marketer.
• rely on other teams to get pages up.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Josh,

You may like these ideas :

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

We use Marketo landing pages for all of our events (registration page, confirmation page, etc.) and any misc. pages that may be needed quickly and may not necessarily fit within our websites' structure.  But for everything else, we use our main CMS (Sitecore) to present a common/consistent user experience across our website.  Every page has Munchkin code on it (and DemandBase) and all forms are embedded forms.  Works great for us.  The main downfall with embedded forms is the pre-fill does not work. We used to use iframes - and although prefill worked - it was very cumbersome.  Embedded forms is the way to go for large, enterprise websites.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Dan - Got a cool trick coming up for prefill on embedded forms. 

@Joe - Agree with @Dan's and @Josh's overall takes.  There's a place for both approaches to coexist within a well-managed marketing/IT organization.  Of course, some orgs will want to create a policy of one or the other, in which case I would go for external pages with embedded forms because of the ability to align styles/layouts/changes/etc. across the enterprise.  But if marketing people really hate their CMS's site builder and are willing to accept the simplicity of Design Studio in exchange for faster time-to-market, that may be their call...

[Anonymous]

Thanks all, all great info, one more question. Do you lose the ability to use Social Sign-on when pages are not hosted using Marketo?

[Anonymous]

@Dan, do you have any trouble seeing landing page interactions in the Opportunity Analyzer report?

@Sanford, would love to hear more about prefill for external pages!

@Joe, did you hear back on social sign on?

[Dan_Stevens_]

We don't use the Opportunity Analyzer (since we have hundreds of active opportunities).  Instead we use RCE (specifically, Program Membership Analysis and Program Opportunity Analysis).  As long as you're capture the appropriate program status within your programs, have a properly built revenue cycle model, and move leads into the proper lead lifecycle statuses, then these two reports work great.

[Anonymous]

@Dan, that's a lot of "ifs"

I haven't gotten too deep into the RCM because we have to sync our Marketo leads to Netsuite and it's pretty dark in there.

I'd love to have some help/guidance on how to reconfigure the inherited setups and start building proper processes.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Waiting to see if I get approved to blog about it here.