Pointing subdomains toward your Ion Console, part 1

When getting started with Ion, one of the first things you should do is decide what domain you would like to use for your Ion console (thus, the pages that are created in Ion). This will be the main domain that users will see when they view your digital experience. You will either purchase a new domain to use for your Ion platform pages, or you will have a subdomain created based on your company’s primary domain. You can point as many domains and subdomains toward your Ion console as you wish.  

  • When your Ion console is initially set up, it will have a dedicated subdomain such as: http://yourcompany.postclickmarketing.com
  • The Ion team will create this URL and provide it to you prior to training. It requires no help from anyone on your team.

You can purchase a new domain (URL) or you can set up a subdomain, and point it toward your console's dedicated subdomain. You can use whatever subdomain you prefer. One we recommend is: http://example.yourcompany.com. 

In order to use a subdomain, you will need to ask the person/team who handles http://yourcompany.com domain to: 

  • Create the subdomain “example” for http://yourcompany.com (http://example.yourcompany.com) and a CNAME record to point the DNS toward your console's dedicated postclickmarketing subdomain (yourcompany.postclickmarketing.com).

http://yourcompany.com and http://example.yourcompany.com are meant for example purposes. Any domain or subdomain can be pointed toward your Ion Console's dedicated postclickmarketing subdomain for use with your Ion pages.

When creating the CNAME record, you cannot include http:// with your postclickmarketing subdomain.

We do not support the use of A records.

Root domains require a special setup as many domain hosts do not support the use of CNAME records. In this situation, you will want to utilize URL forwarding from the root domain to another entry within that domain. One common way this can be handled is by applying a CNAME record to the www entry for your domain and then set up URL forwarding from the root domain to the www version. You could then add the www version to your Ion console and use it to create URLs. Any visitor to the root domain version of that URL will then be forwarded to the www version in Ion. If you are unsure how to set up URL forwarding within your DNS, please contact your DNS vendor for guidance.

Setting up the subdomain and pointing it toward your console's dedicated postclickmarketing subdomain we provide to you is very straightforward and it is the preferred option for most customers driving traffic to Ion pages from direct mail, intra-site and search engine marketing. Google pay-per-click campaigns will require your display domain to match the destination domain, so this option is mandatory for digital experiences you create for your search engine marketing campaigns.

You can point as many subdomains and domains toward your Ion console as you wish. Once they are pointed to Ion you will set them up in Ion in the Domain Manager under "Settings". Your subdomain/domain will  not work unless you set them up in your Domain Manager in the Ion console, so don't forget this important step. For more information on how to add a (sub)domain to your console's Domain Manager, click here.