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In "Why Pop-Ups are Pop-Bad", we looked at the pitfalls of pop-up advertising,
the most significant of them being the way Internet surfers feel about pop-ups.
As I mentioned in that previous article, when you use pop-ups, you take the risk
of your visitor count suffering and the reputation of your site being damaged.
Despite that, many use pop-ups on their sites for a variety of reasons and are
reluctant to cease using an advertising method they feel to be effective.
So, what is there to do? Is the only possibility to either make your visitors
feel frustrated or drop your pop-ups? While your users would probably want to
see the pop-ups disappear completely, that is not always possible. However,
by making some slight changes to the way you use pop-ups, you can often achieve
a result that satisfies both you and your visitors.
Maximum benefit, minimum trouble
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There are multiple ways to make your pop-ups more user friendly, here are some
of my favorites. Try them out and see which ones work for you.
1. Imagine this. You arrive at a site and a pop-up ad appears. Being a veteran
web-user, you close it quickly and continue investigating what the site has
to offer. When you open the next page, the same pop-up comes up. Again, one
click from your mouse and it is gone. On to the next page and the darn thing
pops up yet again! Now you're getting annoyed and start looking for the exit.
OK, you probably didn't have to imagine that. If you've been on the web for
a while, you're likely to have experienced it. Having the pop-up appear once
didn't feel as bad, but when you had already looked at it and decided that you
weren't interested in what it advertised, having it come up again and again
made the site seem very unfriendly.
The moral of the story? Use cookies to identify your visitors and limit the
amount of times the same pop-up is shown to the same user. Although it is claimed
that on average, a person has to see the same ad several times before he'll
react to it, enough is enough.
2. Do not use more than one pop-up on a single page. Using multiple pop-ups
is unlikely to greatly increase the response rate to your advertising, but it
will ensure that the patience of your visitors wears thin a lot faster. A horde
of pop-ups appearing at the same time may crash some browsers and slow older
computers down to a crawl.
3. Consider launching your pop-ups at the moment users exit your site rather
than when they arrive to it. This is likely to make your advertisements seem
less distracting, because at that point your visitors have already finished
using your site and found the information they were looking for.
If you choose to use exit pop-ups, remember that they offer an excellent opportunity
to retain contact with a visitor that may otherwise be lost in cyberspace. A
pop-up to bookmark your site or subscribe to your newsletter is likely to work
better at this stage, as the user has already seen that you run a high-quality
site.
4. Just like all other forms of advertising you use, your pop-ups should offer
content that is relevant to the topic of your site. For example, it's a much
better idea to have a pop-up that sells subscriptions to Sports Illustrated
on your Boston Bruins fan site than a pop-up for an Internet casino. Not only
does it get a better response rate, but it also makes your site to look more
professional.
5. Every time you add pop-up advertisements or adjust existing ones, keep a
close eye on how your audience reacts to the changes. Your visitor count, the
time an average visitor spends on your site and the number of page views per
visitor are all important meters that will promptly notify you of any possible
problems.
About the Author:
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he offers free information
about search engines, directories and other promotion methods. His site can
be found at
http://www.apromotionguide.com/ |
