Can we not use the landing page domain as our email branding domain?

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Hi everyone,

I'm going through a re-brand at my company and we are working with new domains for our landing pages as well as our emails. We've successfully created a new landing page domain, and when I tried to use that same domain in the email setup, it didn't work.

I've been in contact with a few people (our internal IT, Marketo consultants, as well as Marketo CSM and Marketo Support) and they're all working towards a solution that involves creating a new domain for email that is different than the landing page domain. While I understand that that's the solution, I cannot seem to get a clear-plain-English answer as to why we cannot just use the same domain that we use for our landing pages as our branding domain for emails --I can't tell if it's an issue of possibility or capability.

Is it true that you cannot use the landing page domain as your email branding domain? If so, why?

Thanks,

-Leticia

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

It's impossible due to fundamental DNS rules. (This is not specific to Marketo.)

The click-tracking (branding) server and landing page server are different machines running different, mutually exclusive code.

A single hostname cannot, in practice, be an alias for 2 different CNAMEs providing different services. Though you can technically create such a setup, it will not work because people will randomly connect to one of the 2 CNAMEs, and 1/2 the requests will fail.

(I'm simplifying somewhat because a reverse proxy functions as "an alias for multiple machines providing different services." But there's no proxy in the mix here.)