The Answer is No You Should Build all Landing Pages on Your Own Domain
Here’s why there’s really no question in our minds:
Send Traffic to One Domain – Your goal should be to send as much traffic as possible to a single domain. Most third party landing page testing platforms offer some mechanism through which you can develop landing page variants on their platform and then make it look like they’re build on your main domain. This is less effective than hosting one website, in one place, through one hosting provider and sending all traffic (paid, social, organic etc.) to that domain consistently.
There are benefits to sending as much traffic as possible to one domain. This includes paid search traffic etc. The more traffic your domain gets the more seriously Google will take your business. Additionally, adding fresh content to your sitemap also improves the credibility of the domain in Google’s eyes which will have ranking benefits. If you’re going to put work into developing landing pages that convert better and better you should probably fully-own both those pages and the data they produce.
Keep Your Data in One Place – You want to compile all data about your website and its users in one place. That place should be Google Analytics. Not a platform advertising that their interface is just as good as or more in depth than Google Analytics. Just Google Analytics. It’s free and it’s good enough. So to summarize at this point we’ve recommend hosting one website, through one hosting source, and track all data about who is visiting that website from all marketing channels in Google Analytics.
No Extra Fees: Unbounce, Leadpages and others are quite expensive. There’s no way around it. They’ll argue the costs are mitigated by the improved conversion rates but as we’ve outlined above the same results can be achieved by developing landing pages on your own website.
Make Use of Google Optimize
Google Optimize is Google’s version of services like Optimizely. It’s a truly great product and can help you self-manage all your own landing page variant tests in an extremely measured fashion. Learn more about Google Optimize here.
Make a Decision About Whether or Not to Index Landing Pages
You can decide whether you want your landing pages to be indexed by Google. Most of the time we say go for it but there are instances when companies don’t want the landing pages they’re using to convert advertising traffic to be visible to anyone but ad traffic. It’s no problem if you don’t want landing pages indexed by Google you can easily ‘opt-out’ of that. Submit URL’s you don’t want indexed through Google Webmaster Tools.
