Should You Use Pop-Up Banners on Your Site?

We all know how frustrating it can be to read an article online and get interrupted by a pop-up banner asking us to buy something or join a new email list. But the fact that this archaic form of advertising continues to exist must mean that it’s effective, right? So, how do you decide whether to use pop-up banners on your website? Let’s take a look at some of the options and how they’re used, as well as a few steps for determining their effectiveness.

How Pop-Up Banners Work

Contrary to popular belief, pop-up banners are not one-size-fits-all solutions. Different types of pop-up banners serve different purposes, any one of which may be a good fit for your website. The options include standard pop-over banners (which launch on top of open web content, completely obscuring what’s beneath), lightbox-style banners (which appear over the top of a page while graying out the background content) and pop-under banners (which are deployed behind an open web page).

Pop-up banners can meet different goals: You might use one to display an email newsletter opt-in form more prominently, or to encourage visitors to purchase specific products, or to offer a free gift in exchange for a certain action (or some other combination of desired behaviors). And, although some banners launch immediately after a visitor lands on a website, others can be triggered only by new visitors, by readers who spend a set amount of time on a particular page, or by a reader’s attempt to leave that page.

What Web Users Think About Pop-Ups

As you might expect from your own web browsing, opinions on pop-up advertisements range from easy acceptance to pure hatred. Consider these two opposing views expressed in an article on Think Traffic, which asked readers to share their opinions on pop-up banners:

“Pop-ups immediately cause me to leave the website. It doesn’t matter if the content is amazing, I will click away because of the complete disrespect the website owner has for his visitors.” —Jeremiah

“I don’t mind pop-ups. Most people don’t hate pop-ups; they are simply impatient. If you like what a blogger has to say, you might just want to subscribe, and a pop-up is a great tool to do this with. If you don’t want to sign up, patiently wait a few seconds and click on the ‘X.’” —Ryan Biddulph

Despite the varying viewpoints, pop-up advertisements are widely used today. But can we determine conclusively whether these advertisements are effective? After all, if they aren’t resulting in a concrete increase in sales and subscribers for some users, there’s no reason to even think about incorporating them into your own site.

Weighing Increased Sales vs. Disenfranchised Users

One case study on the effectiveness of pop-up banners comes to us from Steve Aitchinson of the A-List Blogger Club. According to his tutorial on the subject, “By spending 15 minutes to produce the pop-up, my subscriber rate jumps nearly 400 percent overnight. I went from 6 to 10 subscribers per day to 25 to 40 subscribers per day.”

Another interesting example of the impact of pop-up advertisements on subscriber rates comes from Mary Jaksch of the Goodlife ZEN blog, as profiled by Barrie Davenport on the A-List Blog Marketing site: “The experiment ran for 22 days. Phase number one ran for four days, where I collected AWeber sign-ups without the pop-up. In phase number two, I set up a premium plugin, called PopUp Domination on my blog, and let it run for five days. Then it was into phase 3 without the pop-up, and finally I reactivated the pop-up.”Clearly, pop-up advertisements have the potential either to dramatically increase sales and opt-ins or to completely disenfranchise your readers — and everything in between these two extremes. The only way you’ll know for sure how pop-ups will impact your website is to conduct your own test.

Testing Pop-Ups on Your Website

To test the efficacy of pop up advertisements on your site, follow these steps:

Step 1: Determine what your pop-up advertising goal is. Will you use your pop-up banners to encourage email list opt-ins, to promote sales, or to request that readers take some other type of action? No matter what type of pop-up you use, you’ll want to have specific, measurable goals to gauge the success of your advertising campaign. For example, if you decide to run a pop-up advertising campaign to increase your number of email subscribers, you’ll want to set specific targets for the number of sign-ups you aim to accrue, as well as the number of complaints that would indicate a failed test.

Step 2: Find the necessary tools to run your pop-up advertising test. Adding a pop-up advertising test to boost your number of email subscribers is the easiest type of test to start with, as most email-management providers offer lightbox-style opt-in forms that you can easily add to your website. However, if you want to pursue a different type of pop-up advertising test, you may need to look for a third-party script to provide this functionality. Pippity and PopUp Domination are two of the best-known programs that offer the capabilities you’ll need.

Step 3: Run your advertising test. Once you’ve set up your pop-up test, be sure to let it run for at least two weeks, if not longer. If you only run your experiment for a day or two, you aren’t getting a large enough set of data to draw any conclusions about how well your pop-up performs. To understand why, consider how much your daily traffic fluctuates over time. Maybe you experience a few days when your site ranks lower on search engine results pages or receives a spike in traffic due to a recent guest post or promotion. Running your pop-up advertising test during either of these anomalies will prevent you from gathering adequate, meaningful test data.

Step 4: Evaluate your pop-up banner test results. Once your data collection period ends, examine your results to see if you’ve met the goals you set for yourself in Step 1. If so, and it appears that pop-up banners are a good fit for your site, consider split testing different pop-up variants in order to find the most effective combination of images and text. On the other hand, if your pop-up test failed to meet your expectations, you have at least a couple of options: If you saw no change in your site’s metrics as a result of your pop-up banners, either take them down or try an entirely different type of pop-up. If you saw some improvement (and didn’t receive enough complaints to warrant taking the pop-up down), try tweaking your pop-up banner slightly to improve its performance using any of the different variables described above.

Have you used pop-up banners on your site? Please share your thoughts and experiences with us in the Comments section below.

Image: Thomas Hawk