I like the idea of operating my own landing pages. For better or worse, I have autonomy over the exact design of my landing pages, and I can test pretty much anything. I can change the colors, I can change the text, I can add or subtract form fields, I can enhance or remove the phone number. With my own landing pages, I can pretty much do whatever I want, as long as I can either do it on my own or pay a designer to do it for me.
There are some costs to doing this, beyond the actual cost of paying a designer to make changes on my behalf. Lost leads is an incalculable cost, and I want to share a recent experience.
Shortly after I bought Tangy.com, I reached out to my hosting provider to add a SSL (thanks to Dhara for the reminder) to the landing page. For some of my domain names like this, I have a landing page with a link to my inquiry form on Embrace.com. Both the landing page and the Embrace.com website are hosted at Liquid Web.
When I asked the Support team at Liquid Web to add the SSL, the technician added it and also mentioned that my server is running quite low on resources. As a consequence of this, the load time on my landing pages was likely very slow, and it is possible there were some brief outages. Since I don’t visit my landing pages or inquiry forms very often, it’s something I had not noticed. I use two downtime monitors, but it’s quite possible the slowness or brief outages were overlooked, although they may have been detrimental to my business.
This issue could have cost me leads from people who visited my domain names to see if anyone owns them. My names are almost all listed for sale on GoDaddy, but I still get the majority of my leads and deals from my landing pages.
The issue was fixed by Liquid Web last night, so my landing pages should be fully operational right now. This type of issue exists for people who host their own landing pages. I like having the control over the design and leads, but having to monitor the website and server is a downside.
When you take a domain name like Tangy.com and forward it to your domain name sales page on Embrace.com; how has that worked out for you? Or do you get better results with the managed landing pages?
I am not forwarding the domain name to a landing page. People need to click the inquiry button to land on the inquiry form on Embrace.com.
I have never had a form directly on the informational landing page.
Understood Elliot.
I was speaking to the server issues you ran into. Instead of Tangy.com being an actual landing page requiring hosting, have you had any decent results forwarding a URL to the Embrace.com page?
Just curious if paid and hosted landing pages generate any better results than free forwarding from the registry to a Domain Sales site like you have for Embrace.com.
You mean something like this: http://www.BeerMaking.com ?
If so, I do that with a fair percentage of names. I have not really tested but have closed many deals on inquiries that go directly to the form.
Yes, that is the option I was referring to.
Thanks for sharing that example. Hopefully you will test it more formally in the future and share your results with the rest of us.