Marketo landing pages versus web site landing pages?

[Anonymous]

Trying to figure out which is better to use and what the benefits are to using Marketo landing pages versus landing pages on your web site? Does anyone prefer one over the other and if so, what is your reasoning behind the one you prefer?

[Anonymous]

One of the benefits of using Marketo landing pages is that they are easy for someone on the marketing team to put together without waiting for our engineers to put together a new page or form. The flexibility allows us to move quickly on our own in situations where we're pressed for time. However, one major drawback is since these pages aren't connected to your company website, it won't add any SEO benefit to your company website. Also, if you're hosting content on these landing pages as PDFs rather than as a part of the website, you're not able to capitalize on any keywords within the content when people are searching. We're actually transitioning a lot of our content now from Marketo LPs and forms to the website. Hope that helps!

[Justin_Norris1 · Accepted solution]

Erica Sanchez​

A few thoughts on the benefits of each, you can probably find many other perspectives on other threads in the community as well.

Marketo Landing Pages

Pros

• Very easy to deploy -- tokenize and clone in programs to launch new pages in minutes
• Take full advantage of all Marketo functionality
• Now easier to make responsive with the new guided template functionality

Cons

• Requires additional development resources to build initial templates
• Extra maintenance overhead to keep LP templates up to date with your main website look and feel

Your Own Website

Pros

• Always consistent with the look and feel of your other site content
• May be more suitable for some evergreen scenarios (e.g., contact us form)

Cons

• May be more difficult to deploy depending on your setup
• Some limitations to Marketo functionality (e.g., no form prefill, acquisition program not set automatically)

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

I agree with Justin that there are pros to making sure the pages match the look and feel of your main website, but for landing pages, this doesn't necessarily matter. You should obviously keep your branding consistent, but the overall layout doesn't need to match and, in fact, some elements (like a nav bar) should - in most cases - be eliminated. I'd test this just to make sure your website's in the majority with those results, but I'd guess it is

In a previous life, I hosted all our landing pages within our website's CMS, and it led to a lot of headaches (mostly attributed to the type of CMS we chose). I tend to favor Marketo landing pages so I can easily close the loop on reporting and take advantage of test groups, which has become increasingly important with the amount of advertising we've started.

Everyone else covered some great points, so those are just my two cents!

​ETA: If you embed your forms within an iframe on your website (thus still technically hosting the form on a Marketo LP), you can gain back some of the Marketo functionality you'd lose by using the javscript embed code instead.

[Anonymous]

This post is great. I'm compiling a massive article on the pros/cons for hosting Marketo pages. Will be referencing this post and highlighting a few quotes to highlight your usage. Thanks