Hi! My company's in the middle of doing a website redesign, therefore updating the look and feel of our landing pages is a must. We're working with an outside web development team for the overall website but we have a decision to make in terms of what is best to host our landing pages. These are the options: WordPress landing pages with a Marketo embedded form (created by the web dev team)Unbounce (managed and created by the marketing team)Marketo Landing Pages (created by the web dev team, updated based on case by the marketing team)Based on everyone's expertise, what would be the best? I would appreciate the feedback. Thanks! Veronica

Hi again Veronica,In addition to all these input:Pros for Marketo LPs: it's really possible today with a good responsive framework and form formatting technique such as the ones described here to get excellent design for Marketo LP. This also applies to Marketo forms embedded o the site. Marketo LP's can also be more flexible for the marketers to produce (this depends on how your CMS has been configured, though)Pros for WP: it integrates better with your web site navigation and yields better results on permanent forms such as a contact form, despite the lack of prefil (we have measured 10% to 20% higher conversion rates).all in all, we usually recommend a mixed approach, where permanent forms are embedded on the web site or created with the CMS form system, while the non permanent ones (e.g. event registration) are produced with Marketo LP's.-Greg

Veronica_Flore2

Level 2

Question

Marketo Landing Page vs Unbounce vs WordPress

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
March 26, 2018
4 replies
7203 views

Hi! My company's in the middle of doing a website redesign, therefore updating the look and feel of our landing pages is a must. We're working with an outside web development team for the overall website but we have a decision to make in terms of what is best to host our landing pages.

These are the options:

WordPress landing pages with a Marketo embedded form (created by the web dev team)
Unbounce (managed and created by the marketing team)
Marketo Landing Pages (created by the web dev team, updated based on case by the marketing team)

Based on everyone's expertise, what would be the best?

I would appreciate the feedback.

Thanks!

Veronica

Marketo

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Grégoire_Miche2

Level 10

Hi Veronica,

attention, the Unbounce / Marketo integration is dangerous for the security of your data. Do not use it. Read more on this here: I want to know is it worth spending on Unbounce when you already have Marketo?

Also, Unbounce will not allow you to get prefil on the pages, while Marketo LP do. So, unless you have a very serious case to use unbounced, it's probably a better choice to put some money in the development of some really nice looking Marketo LP templates.

-Greg

Veronica_Flore2Author

Level 2

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your input. I've used Unbounce before but did not had the important piece of information regarding the security of our data. So Unbounce is out of the picture.

What can you say about building the landing pages in our Wordpress CMS instead of Marketo. Our developer had a conversations with us regarding maintaining the look and field of the new website by using WordPress with a Marketo embedded form. Not entirely sure what are the pros and cons regarding this, especially around the reporting capabilities (Google Analytics vs Marketo landing page report).

I would appreciate more feedback on this.

Thanks,

Veronica

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

As long as you don't use Unbounce's "official" Marketo integration (it's not just security-risky but fundamentally broken) and instead integrate with the Marketo forms endpoint directly (this is easy to do) then you don't need to worry about your data.

But the point about PreFill stands strong! (Unless you use custom development and ensure that dev doesn't introduce exactly the same risk described above.)

Similarly, a Marketo form's Progressive Profiling won't work (obviously) on Unbounce. I happen to think Unbounce is a great platform that makes beautiful pages. Just know what you are/aren't getting.

As for using WP with a Marketo embedded form, in addition to the same PreFill question as above, you're right to flag the reporting question. WP-hosted LPs can't be reported on (at the LP level) in Mkto, though there are lots of ways to get, frankly, better info from another analytics platform. (Although having it all within Marketo has benefits of its own.)

Casey_Grimes2

Level 10

Hi Veronica,

While there are positives and negatives to Marketo LPs vs. WordPress, can I put in another vote for "not Unbounce"? Setting aside Greg's concern about the integration itself (which is a valid enough excuse on its own!), Unbounce's landing page designs are... bad. I've had to convert several Unbounce landing pages over to proper Marketo landing pages, and they basically involved rebuilding the design from scratch. They're not responsive (rather, they just have two bad breakpoints), do odd things due to a lot of absolute positioning and z-indexing, and can actually make you look far less professional.

If I were in your situation, I would get your web dev team to make a couple of generic guided landing page templates that would allow you to customize things on a page-by-page basis. This will allow you to keep everything clean and inside Marketo while looking sharp.

Veronica_Flore2Author

Level 2

Hi Courtney,

Thanks for your input! Looking as Unbounce might not be the perfect solution here and we have the budget and the team who can build Marketo landing pages, what would be the significant pros and cons between Marketo Landing pages and Wordpress? Other than the Munchkin code, the reporting capabilities (granularity or being able to combine Google Analytics and Marketo reports) and the preform (which is huge!).

Thanks,

Veronica

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

Other than the Munchkin code

Munchkin works on WordPress or any other site, though.

Grégoire_Miche2

Level 10

Hi again Veronica,

In addition to all these input:

Pros for Marketo LPs: it's really possible today with a good responsive framework and form formatting technique such as the ones described here to get excellent design for Marketo LP. This also applies to Marketo forms embedded o the site. Marketo LP's can also be more flexible for the marketers to produce (this depends on how your CMS has been configured, though)
Pros for WP: it integrates better with your web site navigation and yields better results on permanent forms such as a contact form, despite the lack of prefil (we have measured 10% to 20% higher conversion rates).

all in all, we usually recommend a mixed approach, where permanent forms are embedded on the web site or created with the CMS form system, while the non permanent ones (e.g. event registration) are produced with Marketo LP's.

-Greg

A

Anonymous

Hi there,

I'm curious if anyone has tried Instapage? Integrations

They claim an integration with Marketo as well but I haven't come across anyone in my network that uses it. Similar to Unbounce, they are a page builder that supports various layers of customization without the need for web developers.

While I'm a fan of team purple, I have trouble in scaling production of their LP's, especially when they are being used for digital advertising.

To your original question, I would also consider what are all the use cases for these landing pages? Events, content download, ads? Each one has a specific usability factor to it and it needs to be taken into consideration when adopting a system, alongside data security.

Best,

Daniela

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