If you are a Marketo customer, you may wonder whether or not you should use Marketo’s landing pages, or your company website for your form gated pages. In this post we’ll go over a few things to take into consideration when making your decision.

Pre-filling forms…

…on Marketo landing pages:

One of the most compelling reasons to use Marketo landing pages with Marketo forms, is that forms will pre-fill fields for returning visitors who exist in your database. However, Marketo has recently changed how pre-fill works due to security enhancements, and now Marketo forms will only pre-fill is when a person comes from a link in a Marketo email that directs to a Marketo landing page with Marketo form.

…on non-Marketo landing pages:

Marketo forms will not pre-fill for known visitors when embedded on a non-Marketo landing page, unless you implement custom code. If you go the custom code route, be sure it is done by a skilled developer who understands the security implications.

Making branding updates or other global changes…

…on Marketo landing pages:

Theoretically making a branding update such as changing your logo should be simple in Marketo. You update the logo on the template and then mass-approve all landing pages to make the changes live. But after years of using a Marketo instance, there will often be multiple different templates in use, so you would need to update each one individually.

…on non-Marketo landing pages:

This will depend on the CMS or landing page platform you are using. But if you are utilizing your company’s website for landing pages, then you will likely only need to update the logo in your header for it to apply to all pages within your website.

Website navigation

…on Marketo landing pages:

If you want the menu navigation on your website to be on your Marketo landing pages, that is something that will have to be hard coded into your template design. Keep in mind that if you do this, the navigation in Marketo and on your website will not be “linked” so everytime you update the menu on your website, you will also need to update it on your template(s).

…on non-Marketo landing pages:

Again, this will depend on the CMS or landing page platform you are using. But a CMS will usually apply a header to all pages within a website by default.

Analytics…

…on Marketo landing pages:

In addition to adding Google analytics tracking to landing pages, Marketo gives you an a view of your landing page performance. This could be helpful in determining which landing pages are no longer getting traffic by looking at “Last Activity.” But really, this is all information you could get in Google analytics, it just depends if you would like the convenience of seeing it in Marketo easily.

…on non-Marketo landing pages:

The analytics you can see on non-Marketo landing pages will be dependent on the platform. Google Analytics tracking will most likely be embeddable on the platform of your choice.

Other things to consider:

Platform ownership

The ownership of the platform or structure of your marketing team could be a key decision factor for which option you choose. If you have a web team that has to build all pages, that could be a bottleneck in getting landing pages up and running on your CMS. While if you are the owner of Marketo, you can easily create landing pages yourself.

Templates

Marketo doesn’t have any landing page templates out of the box (unless you purchase their launch pack), so development of template design could be hurdle in creating Marketo landing pages. Even with purchase of the launch pack, the templates are very basic and will likely require some customization.

URLs

Marketo landing page URLs will be a subdomain of your website domain. For instance, for us it could be “pages.cs2marketing.com.” The subdomain can be whatever you want, as long as it’s at least 2 characters.  It’s not a huge deal, but still something to be aware of.

Overall, the benefits of choosing a Marketo landing page over your CRM are few and far in between, but one of the points above may sway your decision one way or the other. Have you seen anything else that would be a deciding factor? Let us know on Twitter.