I’m within the free trial period and I can’t see why people are raving about Unbounce. I’m struggling to find reasons to stick with it!
First, there’s the URL issue. All my landing pages are at Unbounce rather than at a domain I control.
So I can’t use a .htaccess file, I can’t use a robots.txt, I can’t use a favicon, no server level tracking / error log. Almost zero control over server level / hosting level stuff. Further, there’s the IP. I can’t use a country specific IP (which makes a difference for SEO and other purposes. Maybe even Adwords’ quality score if you’re targeting country-specific traffic).
Why does Unbounce feel the need to “own” my page? Why don’t they offer the option to host the page on my existing hosting account? Hmmm.
If control over your own pages isn’t enough reason … Unbounce’s service goes down without notice. My page was inaccessible for over a day and I got no notification that there was a problem at Unbounce. (I did contact support who promised to get back yesterday but didn’t. If I had started a paid campaign I would have lost hundreds of dollars as the CPC in my industry is very high.)
Heck, even Unbounce didn’t know there was a problem! The support staff kept saying the page was accessible to them and I had to provide tracert proof and a screenshot from the downforeveryoneorjustme site to prove that the page was not accessible. Not good!
Support on the phone is pleasant and friendly; two out of the three times I called I got a person. And the other occasion I got a message saying everyone was busy. But don’t bother with the chat support. Clicking the link to start a chat doesn’t work. Never did for me (Firefox).
So given all the problems/lack of control and the fact that for the price of one month’s Unbounce subscription you can BUY (permanent ownership) some great Wordpress landing page templates that offer a greater range of EASY customizations and integration with aWeber, MailChimp etc., why should I continue using Unbounce? At least with WP there are options such as plugins to do everything from automatic backing up to minifying js and CSS and doing caching to improve page loading times (another big SEO factor). Plus services like getting an SMS if the site goes down!
This is not just a rant. I’m genuinely looking for a good reason. If everyone else is so delighted with the service … what am I missing here?
PS: Oh, yeah, thanks for signing me up with a third parties - like “getsatisfaction” - without my consent, guys, and for disclosing to them details like my real name and email address! That’s really cool.