Why should I not delete this account?

C

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.

11 replies

Next_After

Sounds like Unbounce isn’t for you. That’s okay. It’s not for everybody. 

Phillip

I love Unbounce!

That’s coming from someone who learned web design back in the 90s using Microsoft FrontPage and migrated to using Drupal and Wordpress when CMS became a thing. I can honestly say, for it’s intended purpose, Unbounce is the best of it’s class (sorry LeadPages). I’ve been using it for over a year and trust the customer service and the hosting up-time.

To your point about your page not being accessible… Why would they host their customers on anything less reliable than the hosting company you’d choose? They want to keep making money, and faulty servers are not going to help them accomplish that goal.

Unbounce is for people who want to focus on marketing. If you would rather get distracted by all the other issues associated with web development ( .htaccess, robots.txt, error log…) then go right ahead. I prefer to outsource those headaches so I can focus on getting more customers.

Oh ya… I doubled my conversion rate with Unbounce. If you’d start focusing on marketing, I’m sure you can too.

C

Thanks, Phillip, for explaining your reasons. I’m delighted it works great for you. In my small sample of 48 hours my page was down for over 24. Not a long term study, I grant you, so downtime may not really be an issue here. Possible.

May I ask, what part of doubling your conversions is down to Unbounce itself? So, for example, if those landing pages you created here were created instead by a design firm and you hosted them elsewhere, would you expect to see a substantially lower conversion rate?

ND

PS: As a marketer I’m very keen on reading, analyzing and improving my stats. Control over htaccess/robots allows me to block bots that are skewing the visitor figures, compress files for quicker delivery than Unbounce’s CDN (makes a sizeable difference for mobile traffic), restrict specific pages to visitors from a particular country (great for geo-targeted advertising) etc… all part of a savvy marketer’s job. With respect, you aren’t “outsourcing those headaches”, you’re simply assuming someone else is taking care of all of them. They aren’t. So this price we pay is the tradeoff for … (just) ease of landing page creation?

Phillip

A few months ago, we just finished an expensive website redesign with an agency that works for some of the biggest brands in the world (Nike, GoDaddy…). It’s not like we are bootstrapping web design. That being said, we found it best to send all of our paid traffic to Unbounce and organic/referral traffic to our main site.

Even if you don’t stick with Unbounce. I recommend taking the Landing Page Conversion Course. It’s free, and will give you a little insight what I focus on to get results. I follow the industry pretty closely, it’s one of the best resources out there.

C

Thanks, Phillip. Good link. I’ll read it in more depth this evening. Another worthwhile read is Neil Patel’s: http://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization/

To the support staff who’re clicking the like button on Phillip’s post (but not replying to my support ticket), please pass on the suggestion to management to find some way of letting customers host their own pages. Even if that was still $50 a month the extra conversions I’d get would more than compensate.

K

I’ve tried everything; wordpress, weebly, wix, shopify, volusion, even godaddy web builder and Unbounce is the only once that has been able to produce the best conversion rates. Of course this doesn’t apply for everyone. You just need to test everything that is out there and stay with the one who gives you the best results.  Test, test, test and test.  

C

Thanks, kenji. I’m not surprised you get better conversions on Unbounce than Weebly/Wix type alternatives.

" You just need to test everything that is out there…"

I agree. Have you tested your Unbounce landing page design on a site that YOU own? Why would you not get a higher conversion when you can

  • deliver pages faster (especially to mobiles)
  • stop bots reaching your pages and messing your stats (“clearer picture” benefits)
  • geo-control traffic to deliver different content to users based on their location
  • get instant notifications when your page is down or users are hitting 404s
    etc etc?

This is what I’m struggling to understand. Is it only those marketers who do not realise this or who are incapable of (uninterested?) in further improving their conversions … who stay with Unbounce?

K

Hi! Yeah, for a complete website unbounce is not the best option, but for temporal landing pages that marketing people can do in a few hours to test campaign headlines, calls to actions, pictures, etc Unbounce is great.  

C

Unbounce makes for quick and easy design to test campaigns, CTAs etc. In fact, it makes for very easy and quick work in that regard. I agree completely.  And that does qualify as one reason to not delete the account.

And to Unbounce’s credit, they haven’t deleted this thread 🙂

J

I don’t think it’s to Unbounce’s credit that they have not deleted this thread. I have some of the same questions. These questions are not answered on the Unbounce site. In fact, lots of unanswered questions. Perhaps Unbounce is assuming that everyone thinking about using Unbounce is a professional and needs a zillion landing pages.

Alex

Hey @Juan!

My name’s Alex - I’m part of the Support team in Customer Success at Unbounce. I normally spearhead our e-mail, live chat, and telephone support channels (so I’m not on the community as often) but I did see your message here in this thread and just wanted to chime in really quick.

As @Jess mentioned - we rarely ever delete any posts in the community. In addition to just trying to keep the community tidy (i.e so we don’t have old posts with outdated information that could end up confusing visitors) another big reason for this is Transparency, which is one of the core values we embrace here at the company.

An Unbounce customer who asks why they shouldn’t delete their account is a completely valid question, and it’s one that we would never want to shy away from. After all, the community is a place to start dialogues and conversations.

@Jess and the other Unbounce experts here are definitely here to help with those questions, but if you ever find yourself not being able to find a resource or something you would expect on the Unbounce website, please don’t ever shy away from contacting the Customer Success team either. We’re more than happy to tackle any questions or concerns you might have - even the tough ones like why you should stick with us - and we’ll be completely honest with you!

I hope that @Jess can help grab you the answers you need in the meantime, but I hope this gives you a bit of a glance into how we tackle these types of topics. 🙂

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