Custom campaign domains are awesome. They allow you to use your own domain name for ALL of your campaigns. The best part is, it's very easy to set these up. We even obtain an SSL certificate for you so your campaigns will have an https secure domain without you having to bear the expense and hassle of obtaining your own SSL certificate. If you already have an SSL certificate, you may use it instead of having us obtain one for you.
One thing to mention... You have to make sure your account level allows for a custom campaign domain, otherwise, there will be a one-time fee to unlock it. You will be able to change to a different domain at any time for no additional fee once you unlock it.
Step 1: Go to 'Manage DNS' in the domain settings at your domain provider's website (ex. GoDaddy)
- In the Domain Records section, click 'Add' to add a record
- Select 'Cname' in the list of record types to add
- Enter sociamonials.com in the 'Points to' field
- Choose the shortest time period for TTL. For example, GoDaddy allows as little as 600 seconds. (This is the amount of time you must wait before adding your Custom Domain to your software account)
- If you are creating a SUBDOMAIN (ex. offers.yourdomain.com), you would enter 'offers' here. If you are using the full domain name (ex. yourdomain.com), you would enter 'www' here. Be careful, there might already be a 'www' entry, which you will need to edit and enter sociamonials.com in the 'Points to' field. HOWEVER, do not do this for a domain that is currently used for a functioning website. If you do, the functioning website will no longer work. You would want to use a subdomain instead.
NOTE: Cloudflare users: make sure to turn off proxying for the Cname record. If you use Groove Pages, they use Cloudflare, so go to Cloudflare directly to setup your domain versus doing it within Groove Pages. - Save your changes
- You must now wait for the length of time that you selected in step 4 above before proceeding to Step 2 or your custom domain will not function and you'll need to contact our customer support team.
Step 2: Add Custom Domain to Your Account
- Go to your Account Preferences in the software
- Scroll down to 'Custom Campaign Domain' and expand the section
- Click 'Activate'
- Enter a valid URL using one of the 2 acceptable formats:
- https://www.example.com (Notice that you CANNOT use https://example.com)
- https://sub.example.com (Notice that you CANNOT use https://www.sub.example.com)
- If you don't already have an SSL Certificate for your domain or subdomain or just want to save a lot of time, select 'Automatically generate an SSL certificate for me (https)'. If you DO already have an SSL certificate you want to use, select 'I already have a custom SSL certificate for this domain' and enter the required information. (We don't have access to this information, so you will need to contact your SSL provider to obtain it.)
- There is a small manual process we have to switch over on the backend. Start a chat or ticket and provide your custom domain. We'll activate it as soon as we can.
☝️☝️☝️ The only way to test these custom domains is to launch a campaign and try out the microsite URL that we provide you in the 'Save & Deploy' step of the campaign setup.