Show HN: Redirect your customers from your marketing page to your app

21 points by eaplant 4 years ago | 29 comments

Hi HN!

I've gotten a bit frustrated by going to `datadog.com` instead of `app.datadog.com`. I know that I could use a chrome extension to do this redirect for me (I do). But since this is a painful UX, I think that SaaS companies should do something to improve it for all of their users.

So I made `marketing-redirect`, a quick bit of HTML to put on a marketing page that lets customers get automatically redirected to the application they're already paying for:

https://github.com/elliotaplant/marketing-redirect

You can see an example of it in action here:

https://elliotplant.com/marketing-redirect/

Aside from just making the tools I use better, I'm brainstorming ways to monetize this. My best idea is to create a cloud service the help marketing teams remove or tag the page views from paying customers who visit their marketing page so their analytics software can exclude them as possible leads. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks,

Elliot

szastamasta 4 years ago |

I personally totally hate that idea. I hate it when I can’t open main page for the product to check on pricing, watch for new features or just show it to someone else. I just get redirected to the app and need to find a hacky way to go back.

What is the real problem here, in my opinion, is that the home pages of the apps are not even slightly focused on existing customers. Login buttons are small and hidden, or there’s even no login button at all (you need to go to sign-up and then use ‘I already have an account’ option).

I know that every app needs to grow, but already paying customers are also visiting your homepage. Don’t make them feel like they don’t matter to you.

trungdq88 4 years ago | |

I second this.

Really hate the fact that I can't view their pricing page while logged in.

If I want to go directly to the dashboard/console page, I'll just type for example "console." then the browser auto-complete will do the rest.

bradwood 4 years ago | | |

Yeah. Things trying to second guess my intentions are not cool.

eaplant 4 years ago | |

I think a nice feature of the thing I made is a button that lets users opt in to the redirect. I agree that it would be bad UX to prevent your paying customers from seeing the marketing page if they wanted to.

netizen-936824 4 years ago | |

I'm in the same boat. Whenever a page tries to redirect me to some application when I didn't tell it to, I'm sure to just leave and not use the product/page. Its not worth the annoyance to me

benwoodward 4 years ago | |

Same. However, you can just hit (command/ctrl)-shift-N to create a new Incognito Window and view those pages that way.

niel 4 years ago |

This is useful as a reminder to make it easier for existing users to find your app.

Also, the marketing site being outside of reach of the app dev team is a real problem worth addressing with convenient snippets such as the linked solution.

That said, I'm still not convinced that an automatic redirect is a good idea.

I've had cases where I would like to refer someone to e.g. the pricing page (or a page I remember about a particular feature they need) on a SaaS marketing site, but had to open the marketing site in a new browser to find the link, because I keep getting redirected to the app while logged in. Someone else might have given up and the referral could have been less effective.

I propose rather updating navigation on your marketing site for logged-in users, making it easier to navigate to the app manually.

eaplant 4 years ago | |

Yea I agree. For some reason marketing teams love to make the "log in" link tiny, if they include it at all.

MattGaiser 4 years ago |

Target the people who use Wordpress for marketing, but otherwise have an app. They might pay $5 for this, especially if they are separate business silos. As long as it is super simple to use, this could be a decent non-technical solution to a technical problem.

The challenge is once someone technical is called in, they will realize that this is trivial, so making it possible for non-technicals to easily use (even if just telling them where to paste the code) is essential.

But yes, I have certainly had this annoyance in the past.

weird-eye-issue 4 years ago | |

This. I know of two businesses off the top of my head using WordPress (for the marketing site and customer portal) that I'm a paying customer for where I've struggled to find how to get to my account backend from their main site. For one of the businesses I've seen people ask in their FB group how to login (it's in the footer...)

Please sell this to them! (Assuming it works, I didn't look at it)

eaplant 4 years ago | |

Great idea. Thanks!

onion2k 4 years ago |

If you use this and it works then it's probably worth checking your site's Content-Security-Policy. Either you don't have one or you have it set to allow 'unsafe-inline' to allow inline scripts, and that is potentially quite a serious security problem.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...

codingdave 4 years ago |

We redirect on login - the login link is available from either domain, and once you login the first time, we prompt to ask where you want to go in the future. Most people choose to be taken to the app, but some stick to the marketing site. And the link to your app is always in the main navigation once logged in.

It is fairly simple code, so I'm not sure this is a problem that needs a productized solution.

drikerf 4 years ago |

I've found a compromise to work well. Redirect all visitors from '/' but show all other pages as usual on the marketing site. Also, if someone has navigated to '/' from another page, don't redirect either.

This allows existing users to just enter the domain and get to the app, but also to browse the marketing site if they want.

michaelsalim 4 years ago | |

How do you know when not to redirect on '/'? Based on the history if the URL is the same domain? Does it mean that you make it obvious to the user on how to get to the marketing page from the app?

I'm looking into similar approach but unsure what's best.

flemhans 4 years ago | |

But everything should be served on / and rendered with JS!

pawelwentpawel 4 years ago | |

That is how I have done it as well. In addition, almost every page has a footer with links that can direct existing users to pages like pricing, features, support etc.

brundolf 4 years ago |

Initially I thought this was a Chrome extension that users of these sites could install which would automatically redirect them from marketing.com -> app.com (maybe only when they have a login cookie?)

I think if you made such an extension, and maintained a redirect list yourself for popular SaaS sites, that could be a more viable business. It wouldn't be trivial to reproduce because it's dynamic; you're always adding to the redirect list and keeping it up to date. That's a real, small amount of boring work that can't easily be automated away and people might be willing to pay to outsource.

Good luck either way!

KiranRao0 4 years ago | |

This is very similar in concept to this chrome extension: Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions. It's open source and its purpose is redirecting from youtube.com -> youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. It may be a good place to start for anyone working on an automatic marketing.com -> app.com

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...

https://github.com/SeinopSys/YTMySubs/blob/main/package/back...

pbhjpbhj 4 years ago |

I don't understand why you can't type the address of the page you want to go to, or click a link to get there (or provide a link if you're the website owner)?

It looks like you're forcing people to go to a page other than the one you select, but that would be really crap, so it can't be that ... so what are you doing?

Makes no sense to me, but then I hate websites that want me to install a wrapper around a web renderer just so I can access content that's really only a website ... is that what's going on?

Really, no idea and the demo didn't make it clear why the behaviour was good?

eaplant 4 years ago | |

The thing I made is an opt-in redirect. If you don't want to be redirected from marketing -> app, then you wouldn't click the "Always go to app" button. No content wrapping, no installations, no change in behavior for anyone who doesn't opt in to the redirect. I made it because I often think "I'd like to see how my CI is doing", and then I type "circleci.com", and land on their marketing page instead of the app dashboard at "app.circleci.com".

fouc 4 years ago | |

Yeah, very good point.. I can no longer view https://elliotplant.com/marketing-redirect/ because I'm instantly forced away every time.

eaplant 4 years ago | | |

Did you try clicking the "Disable marketing redirect" button? That removes the redirect.

anglinb 4 years ago |

I’ve wanted this for so long. We proxy our static marketing site just so we can check headers for auth and redirect you to the dashboard if you’re signed in.

eaplant 4 years ago | |

Happy to help :)

alpb 4 years ago |

Looking at you, Cloudflare. https://www.cloudflare.com/ vs https://dash.cloudflare.com/

eaplant 4 years ago | |

On top of the lack of redirect, the login button is tiny

arjvik 4 years ago |

I never knew this was something I wanted! What extension do you use?

eaplant 4 years ago | |

Redirector: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...