A Pop-Up is the First Thing I See at Your Site - WTF Were You Thinking?

.................No they don't

All i've seen is that you think marketers are money hungry pigs.

Do you rant and complain every time someone in a supermarket tries to sell you something. Or when a Chugger (charity mugger) asks you to donate, Or do you think - "That's annoying" and move away. Have you ever completely boycotted a supermarket because of it?

Have you thought, if it's so annoying why do the supermarkets/charities employ such tactics. Could it be because it works?

Popups are no different. Some people will walk away completely.
Some people may actually click the X button to close the window.
(wow that was hard). Others may sign up and opt in.

Testing will prove whether it's effective or not.

Really - I guess all the businesses in the world better sack their salesmen and wait for the customers to come to them.

I think people shouting about how every technique they dislike is giving "IM a bad reputation" are helping to give IM a bad reputation.

I heartily agree with you, Rick. I'm VERY happy to "like" things I like (but can't right now, since I have 5000 friends! How daft is that, Facebook - don't hinder your best users!!). I am the first to praise things I like, but I am turned off from staying at all if there are annoying popups. One offered to leavers of the site would surely be more appropriate? "Now you are leaving, how about being kept in touch?" is surely a softer message.

It's not a case of hate being marketed to.

In fact I love being marketed to.

However, I hate it when I'm marketed to in a way that forcefully stops me from going about my activities as I see fit. I enjoy walking around looking at billboard ads but I'm telling you now, if one of the companies advertising sent out a sales rep who jumped out in front of me and stopped me from going where I wanted to go I'd be pissed.

Same with these horrendous pop ups that take an age to load and just waste your time.

If they work for you great but for me they just make me want to click the back button as fast as possible.

It irritates some viewers, then again some folks come to your page and leave immediately whether you have a popup or not

I think it's better to test and see what your visitors feel, rather than assume it annoys them. If it does you take it down. If it doesn't great you've just converted more people to your list.

If a pop-up offers something of value to the site visitor, only takes up a small percentage of the screen and is easy to close then you can't automatically label it as a bad thing.

I don't use them on my plugins site but have used them in the past on other sites and exit pop-ups have delivered up to 9% increase in visitor to purchase rates. Admittedly welcome pop-ups have lower impact on immediate sales but they can increase opt-in rates.

I personally am not a fan of seeing pop-ups but that is normally because they are irrelevant to what I want to achieve with that website visit.

Hi Lee

As you can see from my post above, I fall into that category.

And I want to concur with you that the reason I hate it is because of my presumptions. I do think "Oh dear, what crap is this now" when i see a pop up appear.

However, the main problem I have with them is that they are intruding and just make me angry when I'm happily going in my own direction and then BOOF! this shady looking thing pops on and stalls my browser for a few seconds...

That's my opinion and like I said, if they work for you then that's great. But I won't ever be using them!

Strictly speaking from an organic search point of view, when I get to a website, and it is through a search engine, I have singled out the content I am after, and just as I am about to begin to read the content, my experience is interrupted, with what I consider to be unwanted content, since search engines do not index popups, I rather suspect it would be impossible to determine that the user wants that content, in fact I suspect the opposite, more so for organic traffic.

If you are using GA, you can look at your stats and determine right away if it is really effective, sure you might get a few here and there, but how many are you loosing? That is the real question, one that I believe is likely apparent. To me, (and this is just my opinion) a pop up is for marketers that do not have good enough content to keep the readers attention for any length of time, so they us a popup to grab the readers attention, but what really happens is that once the reader is interrupted, you have psychologically interrupted their thought process, to demand their attention,

Think of it this way, if you were at a restaurant, with ten of your best friends would you interrupt them and ask them if they wanted to join your mailing list while everyone was talking about how good the food was?

No, that would be rude, right?

There is no doubt, that psychological point of view what your doing is rude to most website visitors, except for the very few, that are not really interested in the content they came to see in the first place, or perhaps they are easily distracted, in which case they are usually just browsing around not really paying attention in the first place, I have been doing this stuff Internet Marketing for 15 plus years, I have seen and done it all.

What works is good solid content, and an offer that meets the needs of the user, that is what works, interrupting and down right Rude, (hey look at me) stuff is a huge turn off, most of the time I am out of there, now what was I looking for in the first place, was it a product, was it an ebook, was it a video, you will never know, because I am already gone and looking at the search results, and luckily my browser shows your visited link in a easily recognized color so that I can avoid ever coming back to your website.

That is what I find interesting, searching has become a game, of is this what I want, when I get to a site where there are flashing banners, every where, and very little text or a video that just spins around for ever, without presenting content, when I see that my time has been wasted by some grey hat or even black hat technique to get a higher index in the search engines, I am out of there.

Often irritated, that I just gave up time out of my busy life and was rewarded with an advertisement, instead of the content I was searching for in the first place.

I believe that this is a good solid psychological response that can be demonstrated time after time, with predictable results, the bottom line is this, do you make loads of money from an opt in or from an Ad, presented in this way, if the answer if yes I make thousands of dollars doing this then I guess you have to do it, but if the answer is no I do not make much money doing this then that too tells a story.

Like the old story goes, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink.

I was just talking about something quite similar with one of your team... weird

In further elaboration of my point above where I wasn't actually bashing pop up's, it's just that I don't like them (which is frankly irrelevant because if they work for me I'll use them).

I'd also like to point out if I do get one pop up on me, although I may close it without reading it I most certainly wouldn't not read what's on the site.

Invariably that's why I was there in the first place.

Annoying as some peple find them, they must work in a lot of cases otherwise we wouldn't see them, just like those irritating Nigerian "Lucky you, you're Uncles snuffed it and left you several million dollars" scams, that keep doing the rounds.

They must be working.

Had to reread that one a few times

You think he opts into them all?

Then you should have your internet access taken away from you, all you did was clog up the mailing system for everyone.

Your a menace