Your marketing website is a product too

And you need a PM with dev resourcing to own it.

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Let’s clear up a misconception: your marketing website isn’t just a branding touchpoint or a digital billboard for your company. Especially if you have a self-serve product: It’s a crucial part of the product experience. Too many companies treat their marketing site as if it exists separately from the main user journey, leading to a disconnect where the site feels like it represents an entirely different company than the product itself. Yuck.

Your Website: More Than Branding Real Estate

Marketers often become fixated on making the website aspirational, sometimes acting as though creating a new category is a matter of survival. They pour endless effort into perfecting colors (debating for months over the right shade of blue), crafting crisp icons, delivering bold messaging (think ‘digital transformation’ with mandatory ‘powered by AI’), and achieving stunning visual design. While aesthetics are important, they are not the only goal. What should the objective be? Performance.

Yes, marketing teams will look at impressions and clicks. But how many marketing sites measure new users, new logos, and conversion rates from to signups and active users? Or track how efficiently the site moves prospects deeper into the funnel? Not enough.

Shockingly, some of the marketing sites don’t even have acquisition goals- true story!

Here’s the truth: The website generally is not the first touch point anymore. People are hearing about your product from other people (via dark social 😱). Your website isn’t just a showcase for your vibe; it’s the first step in activation. We have to start thinking of it as being part of the product itself.

The Product-led Growth Perspective

You know who treats their websites as a product? E-commerce companies—because they actually sell things directly on the site! Consumer companies generally do a decent job too. But B2B companies? They’re often completely clueless. Why? Much of this stems from the fundamental differences between Product-Led Growth (PLG) and traditional, sales-led approaches and most of the b2b marketing teams are bread and led to support enterprise sales.

Enterprise Websites

For sales-led organizations, you probably expect at most 3% of visitors to convert into leads. Because the CTA is ‘speak with sales’ and the price point is so high, there’s a significant barrier to any visitor taking action. Not many people are cruising through your site to drop casual $50K. The low volume of conversions means that the general goal for the site is education… and a long page with lots of information is fine.

PLG/Self-serve Websites

In PLG product with freemium models, the barrier to entry is incredibly low—often as simple as entering an email. Conversion rates from traffic to signups are 30-50% (ungated freemiums, with no sign-up wall, may see those rates in 60-70%). The high volume of conversions means lots more opportunity for optimization, and the ability to link directly to in-app experiences means you don’t just have to settle for educational content. Sure, some user education can be beneficial… but the major pages - like your homepage, pricing page, and SEM/SEO landing pages for your keywords - should be hyper-optimized for action.

Treat Your Website Like a Product

When you shift from seeing your website as more than just marketing collateral, everything changes. You start to consider all of the standard elements that you’d address for any other product:

1. Infrastructure work: What systems and structure are necessary to insure long-term scalability? This could look like investing in AB testing tools, tracking, and/or building out a more robust content management systems.

2. Feature work: How functionality can be added? This might be building in more self-servability, increasing the personalization capabilities, or being able to add more animation.

3. Growth work: How can existing flows be optimized for conversions? What metrics can be influenced by improving different elements of the experience?

4. Innovation work: Where does this surface need to evolve to stay current—or even get ahead of the industry? This could be letting people to get straight into the product without any traditional sign-up in between, aka ungated freemium. (Rows is a good example of this.)

Key Metrics

One key way to shift this perspective is to adjust which KPIs you track. Here’s what you should pay attention to:

• (Outcome) Acquisition targets: new users, new teams, new logos - whatever makes sense to measure before activation. Focus on the target customer, not just anybody.

• (Input) Number of new prospecting visitors: First-time visits who generally fit your target audience, MINUS any return visitors.

• (Input) Prospect-to-signup conversion rate: How well does the site move users into the product?

Besides having these specific metrics identified, you’ll slice them in lots of different ways. In particular, I recommend:

• Channel/Geo: Which sources driving the traffic and best conversions?

• Time on site: Which visitors are spending more time, and on which pages?

• Page types visited: Which pages are playing a key role in the conversion journey?

Measure the right things and you’ll see your org start to manage the right things.

Side rant: When marketing teams want to drive more acquisition, they almost always default to one activity that rarely works—rebranding. In fact, 99% of the time, it actually hurts performance metrics (I’ve seen this firsthand). If you’re looking to boost acquisition, avoid rebranding unless it’s an absolutely necessary pivot and you’re prepared to spend six months digging out of the hole it creates.

Note: Why you need a website PM.

To implement this the right way, you may need to hire a Website Product Manager with dedicated dev resources.

If you don’t have a Web PM—who owns your website? In many companies, it’s a project manager, who simply herds all the marketing cats. Or maybe a ‘web producer’ who simply implements someone else’s ideas. Instead, a web PM can take real ownership and approach things from a different perspective:

• Strategic angle: Treat the site as a core part of the user journey.

• Technical infrastructure: They manage personalization, dynamic content, and self-serve tools for marketing teams.

• Optimization: They experiment, iterate, and treat the website like a living, breathing product.

For PLG companies, this role is a no-brainer. Your website is your acquisition moment and it is as critical to the product experience as your onboarding. You don’t want to leave it as a side project for a junior marketer… or simply managed by committee, with no one actually owning it.

Side note: Where Should the Website PM Report? The Website PM could report to the CMO or growth marketing, but PMs typically prefer to sit on the product or growth team. A balanced solution? Have the PM report into product or growth with a dotted line to marketing. That way, the role stays cohesive and connected to the broader user journey.

Final Thought: Learn From E-commerce (But Don’t Overdo It)

Like a lot of PLG, B2B companies can learn a lot from our Consumer peers… especially e-commerce. In ecomm, the website is the product. You better believe high-traffic e-commerce sites obsess over KPIs and iterate relentlessly on the buyer journey.

However… don’t take it too far. Yes, learn from ecomm, but don’t try to put revenue expectations on the website team. Remember: You’re probably selling a complex work solution, not leggings. The buying cycle will inevitably be longer, so a lot of weight for the actual monetization will rest on the in-product experience.

In fact, I’ve seen this go wrong: At one b2b company I worked with, leadership decided to attach revenue targets to the web team. In trying to optimize for those numbers, the team ended up substantially skewing the overall audience toward cheaper (but easier to convert) b2c-style customers and ignoring the enterprise customers that would never buy directly from the website.

So, it’s not a single, simple fix—but the more you treat your marketing site like a product, the faster you’ll grow.

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Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel.

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