When are they going to shit-can sites that have tiny 'next' buttons next to big Google ads with arrows in them? The ones like "20 pictures of celebrities' hairy moles!".
Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
21–30 of 311 posts
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#22I still do not understand the popularity of this approach. It seems to crazy increase bounce rates. You would think that negative user behavior would already make these undesirable without Google being explicit?
As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials: 1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason. 2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates re…
I am not sure I agree with your first point. It seems the most frequent case is that a user wants to access content right away. Regardless of how much "better" the native experience might be, its a lot of hoops to jump through to fulfill the immediate need.
I certainly can't argue that it does yield positive business results under certain scenarios, but for the average user it seems to injure common web experiences.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#23I still do not understand the popularity of this approach. It seems to crazy increase bounce rates. You would think that negative user behavior would already make these undesirable without Google being explicit?
As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials: 1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason. 2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates re…
One unfortunate thing that imo is increasing the value of app installs (and therefore how much "collateral damage" in bounce rates is worth it) is that companies are starting to use them as a push ad platforms. Once your app's on the phone, you can push notifications whenever you want, not only when the user is actively using the app. While with a mobile website, once they navigate away from the site you can't push ads until the next time they visit.
The Hotwire Android app was the first one I noticed doing this, raising notifications unrelated to actual use of the app (e.g. for bookings). If they have a general promotion, like "fall sale" or something, they push a notification to a targeted subset of users. In their case there isn't even an option in the app settings to opt out of the notification spam. Yelp was the second app I found doing this, but they at least have an opt-out in their settings menu. For apps that don't, you can entirely revoke their notification privileges in the central Android settings, but I doubt the average user knows how to do that.
My dislike for playing whack-a-mole with this kind of nonsense is why I don't install apps anymore (outside a few trusted exceptions, like Wikipedia's app), and just use mobile websites.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#24Seems a bit hypocritical, considering they were using app install interstitial pages as recently as July: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/google-...
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Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#25Does this apply to "please subscribe to our stupid newsletter" that obscures many sites now?
I'm more annoyed with these sites than the app install sites. "Install our app" is annoying but still trying their best to send us where we will have better have better experience (at least that's what they think). These "subscribe to our newsletter" sites do it for their own good and couldn't care less about visitors. They do it so they can spam them with their emails
> "Install our app" is annoying but still trying their best to send us where we will have better have better experience
Not always, apps give them the ability to have push notifications plus the fact that having the app icon in your app tray is a constant reminder of their service.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#26Does this apply to "please subscribe to our stupid newsletter" that obscures many sites now?
What disappoints me most is that a lot of the sites submitted here use this same super annoying tactic.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#27I hope they also stop serving adverts that redirect from Safari to the App Store too
I thought Safari doesn't even allow this anymore because of all the popup forwarder spam?
UIWebView is definitely still vulnerable, as I've seen it when browsing sites through the default Twitter iOS client. Not as frequently as in the past, however.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#28I hope they also stop serving adverts that redirect from Safari to the App Store too
Facebook links used to be so bad with this until they changed something in the built-in browser to catch them. Now every time I get a "this page is trying to leave the app" confirmation box I feel extremely satisfied that the redirect was squashed.
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#29Seems a bit hypocritical, considering they were using app install interstitial pages as recently as July: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/google-...
Not really, seeing as the article you link addresses that? It's like a car company saying "we used to only make black cars, but actually we looked into it, and now we think people want colours; so we're making them".
Continued:
"So we're making them, and we're penalizing any dealerships that are still selling black cars."
Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials: 1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason. 2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates re…
I am not sure I agree with your first point. It seems the most frequent case is that a user wants to access content right away. Regardless of how much "better" the native experience might be, its a lot of hoops to jump through to fulfill the immediate need. I certainly can't argue that it does yield positive business results under certain scenarios, but for the average user it seems to injure common web experiences.
Sure -- that makes sense. I find that it depends upon the category or space that the company is in.
For eCommerce, this type of interstitial is a no-brainer: users have an easier time feeling more secure purchasing through an app vs. Safari or some other mobile browser. (Especially if it's Apple Pay enabled!)
For content heavy sites, it might be that the opposite is true: faster access to content can be used to hook the user. If you own one of these sites, you still need to design a method to get the user to come back repeatedly after you post updates. Email subscription modals do a good job at this, but people hate giving their email - especially on mobile.