Vanity URL Best Practices For Marketing Campaigns

3. Create a Vanity URL, Stay Away from IT

IT and Marketing are the Hatfield and McCoys of interdepartmental relationships

When you build a standalone microsite on a third party platform, whether it’s on a robust behemoth like Hubspot or a Lightweight utility tool like Boingnet, you have to determine your URL structure when the campaign goes live. You have a few choices. But if you want your microsite or landing page to point to a subdomain or subdirectory of your company’s parent domain, you’re going to need to get IT involved.

When a microsite or landing page is tied to your root domain, you can expect to have some lengthy conversations with IT about your unreasonable timelines or their preferences for subdomains vs. subdirectories. It’s just the way it goes. IT and Marketing are the Hatfield and McCoys of interdepartmental relationships. We have different objectives, different concerns, and a different understanding of each other’s jobs. This disconnect can bury a time-senstive project under piles of support tickets, unnecessarily long email threads, conference calls, and meetings

Or, you could cut IT entirely out of the equation (they will thank you for this) by redirecting a vanity URL to the URL generated by your marketing software.  Most of the time this is easy enough for you to do on your own through your domain registrar and marketing tool. But if you are working with a third party agency or services partner, they can always do it for you as well.

4. Vanity URLs Keep Your Audience Focused On Your Message

Standalone microsites and landing pages with vanity URLs let you engage with users in a focused setting without any outside distractions.

The purpose of microsites and landing pages are to add focus to the digital user experience, to make it easy for visitors to quickly find and do what you want them to find and do. That’s why standalone microsites and landing pages with vanity URLs are so great — they allow you to engage and interact with users in a focused setting without any outside distractions to derail the conversation.

When you tie a campaign like this to your primary brand site, however, you’re opening up a number of potential opportunities for users to do anything other than what you want them to do.  There’s a chance they could get lost or distracted by all the great content you’re offering on other pages. Before the prospect knows it, they’re checking out your blog and perusing your offerings before somehow ending up on the careers section of your site wondering why and how they landed there in the first place.

5. Track The Success of The Campaign, Not The Brand

As I mentioned earlier, today’s marketer needs to demonstrate ROI when investing in any campaign. And since almost all SMBs are marketing on a tight budget, it’s critical for them to understand exactly what is producing value and what isn’t.

Campaigns that drive to a microsite or landing page vanity URL take your audience directly where you want them to go, instead of taking them to a corporate home page with multiple messages. Not only does this help keep your messaging focused so the audience hears what you want them to hear, but it also makes sure that all the traffic, data, and conversions that come from the campaign can be tied back to your particular program instead of your parent brand. It is much easier to measure exactly how many visitors you have, what those visitors did and didn’t do when your traffic is being directed to a campaign specific vanity URL.

Vanity URL Best Practice Tips

Carefully choose which words you use in a vanity url. Complex words, uncommon words, or unusual spellings can derail the effectiveness of your campaign without it ever having a chance.

We’re often asked to give our opinion on what is the best way to structure a URL for a microsite or landing page.  Here are five vanity URL best practices to consider before choosing a vanity URL for your marketing campaign.

• Keep it simple: Stick to a two or three word phrase – The longer your domain name, the more likely someone will forget the address or make a mistake. Also, don’t choose a URL that requires spell check to get it right. Complex words, uncommon words, or unusual spellings can derail the effectiveness of your campaign without it ever having a chance. Hint: words with “ie” or “ei” are the most commonly misspelled words.

• Avoid Slashes: While some might suggest you go with a com/vanity structure, we at Boingnet believe that vanity.com is the most effective way to do it. It’s a more foolproof approach, especially since (in our experience) users simply do not want to type anything after typing “.com”. Not only do they often forget exactly what comes after the slash, oftentimes they’re just too lazy to do it (myself included) and would prefer just go to your home page and find your campaign from there.

• Avoid Dashes between each word: Choose a domain that represents your company, product, or service in a succinct, branded fashion without dashes. People used to create domains with dashes in the past to insert exact keyword phrases and boost SEO. But that sneaky little doesn’t work anymore since Google’s EMD Update for “Exact Match Domain” update, which changed the Google algorithm to prevent any benefit received from keyword stuffing URLs.

• Capitalize every word: Always make sure you capitalize the first letter of every word in your URL when you promote it in print or online (example: JoesArtisanJellies.com). For example, do you want your URL to look like molestationnursery.com or www.MoleStationNursery.com Which reads better to you?

• Don’t add www to the URL for any type of offline activity. As a rule, you should always try to limit the amount of keystrokes you ask a user to make.  This leaves less room for error, which results in greater user engagement and higher conversion rates.