Landing Pages vs Website Pages

[dillonlee02]

Hi all,

I wanted to get people's thoughts around the use of landing pages within Marketo vs moving your experience completely to your website. At my previous employer, we did away with using landing pages and moved our entire experience to our website. Each CTA push that involved us directing to a page we internally hosted would be our website since that is where we got our most traffic vs landing pages, which didn't yield much form conversions.

What is the benefit of using landing pages over using your Website to host everything (e.g., Gated Assets, Ungated Assets, Event promotions, etc.) - technically speaking, couldn't all of this live on the website? I understand there is an A/B Test feature in Marketo for landing pages, but personally have never used this feature. Is there a benefit with this feature (assuming there is because I see great value when I A/B Test emails out of Marketo), and then what would you be able to A/B Test here?

Best,

Dillon

[Katja_Keesom]

A couple of things come to mind:

• For the seamless user experience it is indeed a good idea to integrate into your website.
• Embedded forms as a standard do not offer prefill functionality though, so if you want your forms to prefill you need a Marketo LP or some good coding experience to implement a workaround.
• Also, in general, Google has some issues with your website having many "floating" pages that are not integrated in your menu structure. Therefore it could be better to use Marketo LPs for temporary pages like event subscriptions.

Just my two cents worth.

[dillonlee02]

Hi there,

Thanks for that information! Yeah, I know at my last company, we used embedded forms on the website and I believe our JavaScript code was pulling in the cookie values for the form prefill. However, if a user clears their cookies, then they would need to fill out the form again. I was hoping to implement something like this at my current company, as well as doing progressive profiling, but it seems to me this would not follow best practice since our Marketo instance has multiple partitions and duplicate records, and we wouldn't data to be overwritten. To my understanding, automation admin leaders believe we wouldn't be able to implement progressive profiling. But this is good to know with the landing pages. We are using those quite heavily here, but at the last company our experience was strictly the website and we'd track everything with UTMs.

Best,

Dillon

[SanfordWhiteman]

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To my understanding, automation admin leaders believe we wouldn't be able to implement progressive profiling.

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Not true. Progressive Profiling works fine with embedded forms, even without any additional code.

Progressive Profiling doesn’t require field values to be sent across domains. It only requires that it be known whether there is a non-empty value or not. That’s why it doesn’t have the same security concerns as Pre-Fill, and why it natively works with the embed.

Pre-Fill indeed requires my (heavily used) custom JS to work across domains. It’s not too hard to get working, but it isn’t out-of-the-box.

There are a number of things that LPs can do that your website can’t. These may not be compelling enough to sway your final decision, of course.

• display lead/company/program/my.token values
• switch dynamic content using Marketo Segmentations
• use pURLs for direct mail, SMS, other non-email entry points with personalized content

[Katja_Keesom]

I suspect the concern about progressive profiling is not so much about the technical possibilities, but the duplicates being a concern. If there's a lot of dupes I can imagine it gets messy.

[dillonlee02]

Thank you for your response, Sanford. This is definitely helpful in understanding the security concerns of Pre-Fill, the benefits of Progressive Profiling, and the benefits of LPs vs website.

[EllenSchwier]

I have seen two different approaches to Marketo Landing pages.

1. Put everything long-term on your main website. Only use Marketo landing pages for temporary things, such as event registrations or temporary promotions. This sounds similar to your approach.
2. For those with a website controlled by IT or where it is extremely difficult to make updates, using Marketo landing pages for everything simply because they are more accessible and support faster edits.

For your question about the benefits of A/B testing landing pages, I would use those temporary Marketo landing pages to test ideas and then incorporate the learnings into your main website. The A/B functionality on landing pages is a little different from emails, in that there is no winner declared automatically and there is only one type of test. You simply need two (or more) landing pages and you can compare the number of conversions between them.  Think about testing the number of fields on a form...or the length of the text...or if including a video helps. There are other tools that let you do the same thing on your main website, but they often cost a lot of money.

[dillonlee02]

Thank you for this response, Ellen! Indeed, option one was what my last company was using for this approach, however, at my current employer, we are going with option two. Being how you explained the control from IT's side, it makes sense now as to why they are most likely utilizing LPs more than my last employer since we had one POC on our marketing team managing the website code. And I appreciate the explanation with the LP A/B Testing as I didn't know there was no winner declared, but good to know how to use the LPs to test and to compare & contrast the form conversions amongst two (or more) LPs, if needed.