One week ago, I've posted a question on the webmasters forum which has not even received a single comment. Thinking about it now, the question may be too technical / is inherently related to technical aspects of domains, first- vs third-party cookies, tracking / analytics implementations, identity resolution, etc. So I thought of adding the question here:
I've a new customer who previously worked with a marketing agency who creates landingpages for his marketing campaigns. Imagine the customer's main website running on example.org.
The agency creates all their landingpages that serve as target of campaigns on a separate domain, e.g.:
- Instead of running a marketing campaign about medicinal-topic-1 via a landingpage hosted on
example.org/medicinal-topic-1, they host that landingpage with a brand new installation onmedicinal-topic-1.org.
Their argumentation is that, if anything is "flagged as bad content" in terms of SEO on medicinal-topic-1.org, that it won't affect the ranking on example.org.
Besides the obvious downsides of:
- Needing to configure a separate server / server directory for every single landingpage.
- Needing to manage a separate wordpress installation for every single landingpage (which is how they manage the content of their landingpages - massive overkill imho).
- Losing your visitor's trust in your brand when they drop on a somewhat random domain instead of dropping on your
example.orgdomain. - Data Tracking Configurations becoming an absolute mess due to this, especially with the upcoming third-party cookie deprecation (e.g. how to track conversion on your
medicinal-topic-1.orgdomain that actually originated from a deep link ofexample.org?) - Actually not gaining the traffic of your campaigns on your main website.
- and so on....
I wonder if the argumentation of the agency is actually true / makes any sense?