Cloning landing pages vs. scalability

[Anonymous]

Hello Marketo community,

I'm hoping one of the brilliant marketers here can help me solve a problem we are facing.

Like all integrated marketing campaigns, we are using several tactics like display ads, email, social, sem etc. that push to Marketo landing pages.  Right now, we are cloning landing pages for each of these tactics because we want to see how each tactic is contributing to the campaign.  This means there could be 25-50 cloned landing pages based on the campaign...and this is just for 1 campaign.  So as we make tweaks to the landing page headlines, body copy, buttons etc. we need to modify 25-50 pages.  Then if we multiply that by the number of campaigns, we need an army of people to maintain to ensure all pages are updated.

I find it hard to believe that this is the only way to provide the visibility and detail on how each tactic is doing.  Is there a way to create only 1 or 5 (max) landing pages and have all tactics drive to that 1 landing page while maintaining the visibility on how much traffic/clicks/conversion is coming from each of the tactics?

Thanks everyone!

[Anonymous]

Yes, what you want to do is use parameters in the URLs that point to your Landing Pages.  For example, if it is a display ad the url would look like this: www.landingpage.com?campaign=display_ad_1, for email it would look like this  www.landingpage.com?campaign=email_1  etc... etc... 

Then when you report on the landing page conversion you filter on visitis page with a contraint of URL contains display_ad_1 etc....

This is the best way to fix your problem.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jamie.  We do this via the Custom URL builder?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Evan, you don't really need to use the URL builder, although it can be helpful if you aren't familiar with adding URL parameters. Basically, you can add anything after a ?, and that becomes a URL parameter.

Also, I would strongly advise using tokens if you do clone, because then you can make a change in one place and it will perpetuate across everywhere that local token is used. There are plenty of examples of this in the community if you do a quick search.

[Anonymous]

Hi Evan -

We do what Jamie mentions. When we send emails, we use the same form and web page, but we add to the URL in the CTA. Example:

CTA link: http://yourcompany.com/ThankYou?utm_campaign=This_Campaign_2016

Then for the smart campaign we use that to ensure that person is a member of that campaign

[Anonymous]

Hi Evan, you can use the Custom URL Builder. We've switched to a Google Sheet to manage our URL creation so that it standardizes certain fields we have such as Lead Source and Asset Type. It also explains the parameter name and the field name (which for us are different names). Here's a sample of our basic version:

We set up a program based on content and then use Tracking Codes (mkto_source) to determine the appropriate campaign in the Form Fill Flow. It's very typical for an eBook program to have several Content Syndication and Display campaigns running against it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jamie, Jennifer and Emily.  Is it me or does this sound incredibly easy?  Just to be sure I'm clear and I understand what you are saying, I see the steps like this:

1. Create the Marketo landing page to get the URL.  For example:
   go.landingpage.com/blah/blah/blah.html
2. Create a standardized query string.  This query string does not need to come from the Marketo platform itself, but we will use the Marketo Smart Campaign tool to analyze that inbound traffic.
   ?utm_source=sem&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=xyz
3. Put the Marketo URL (in #1 above) & the query string (in #2) together for each tactic
   go.landingpage.com/blah/blah/blah.html?utm_source=sem&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=xyz
   go.landingpage.com/blah/blah/blah.html?utm_source=email&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=xyz
   go.landingpage.com/blah/blah/blah.html?utm_source=social&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=xyz
4. After campaign launches, use the Smart Campaign tool to analyze the traffic with the query string elements

Thanks again guys!

[Anonymous]

Almost. You do need to add the hidden fields to your forms to pull in the parameters.

[Anonymous]

Ah!  So what you are saying is that in order to see the conversions (ie, people who hit submit) on the inbound traffic, the form needs to pick up the values from the query string/hidden fields?

Sorry for being specific, but I'm technically challenged 🙂

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Evan, it depends on how you're processing things... If you just create a smartlist of people who visited page go.landingpage.com/blah/blah/blah.html?utm_source=social&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=xyz, then you don't need to have hidden fields to collect the data. If you want that information to be stored upon a form submission (at that point you'd have to decide if you want that information to only be populated the first time, or if you want that to overwrite every time), then you'd need to use hidden fields that would be populated by the information. The hidden fields will require you to be very strict (even down to capitalizations in the URL) on naming conventions, whereas if you're just using it to track what pages a person visited, or on what page they filled out the form, then you can be a little more lax.