Updated March 14 2013

Understanding URLs

A ‘unique resource locator’ (URL) is the address at which a web page is found.  Our support website, for example, can be found at http://support.unbounce.com/home

This URL can be divided into parts:

>The Subdomain: support

>The Root Domain: unbounce.com and

>The Path: /home

Combined, these parts tell a browser which web pages to display and where to find them. 

Understanding CNAMEs

A Canonical Name Record (CNAME) is a bit of internet trickery that allows a URL to show pages hosted at a different domain.

What does that mean?

For a variety of reasons, your Unbounce landing pages are permanently hosted on our servers at unbouncepages.com.  

When you first publish a page, it appears at the URL unbouncepages.com/yourpage.  However, you might not want your visitors to see that your landing pages are hosted at Unbounce.  You might want your visitors to see your pages at your own domain.  Likewise, you might be running an ad campaign with a service like Google AdWords who require your pages to appear on your own domain. Most importantly, pages hosted on the unbouncepages.com domain will not be indexed be search engines.

Without needing to do any complicated uploading/downloading, editing, exporting, crying etc., you simply tell your domain www.yourdomain.com to display the pages you have hosted over at unbouncepages.com.  

A CNAME record is the techno-babble way to do this.

You can follow these step-by-step instructions to set up your custom domain.

You can find CNAME set-up instructions for many common hosting providers in our Support Base