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F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

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Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#131

Post by notdanariely »

cgarvey wrote: post #101
notdanariely wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't say this to criticize anything you said, but to offer the perspective of a company. If they produce content for the sake of conversions, does it really matter to them if you hit back as soon as you see the popup? You've self-selected to indicate you aren't interested in doing business with them based on their popup practices. From their perspective, this could be a bonus. Not that server resources are that sc…

I think one failure point of this thought process is that popup practices don't relate to the content or why the User clicked on the article to begin with. Popups that cover/interrupt the content aren't necessary and shouldn't be a "match" indicator for your company. Unless you're in the business of selling "annoying" products and you need people who are tolerant of that or enjoy being annoyed.

An interesting addition, thank you!

After considering your comment, I still think my original point stands. Instead of thinking about the product being sold, think of it like qualifying a lead based on their receptiveness to your advertising.

It would need to be tested whether that would be more highly correlated with conversions / profits, but I'd probably consider someone who is receptive to my advertising as a higher priority lead than someone who is interested primarily in my content.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#132

Post by jgaxn »

true_religion wrote: post #128
jgaxn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ran a test of info-gathering popups on one of my sites a little while back. We split tested using various triggers. popup after 5 seconds: - 73.5% left the page without closing the popup. popup after 10 seconds: - 75.8% left the page without closing the popup. popup triggered when the user scrolled near the bottom of the page: - 21.5% left the page without closing the popup. The scroll trigger was pretty useless t…

I'm curious... is that 75.8% a bounce rate from the entire site, or just navigating away from the page?

Navigating away from the page, although there was no interaction on the popup that would have kept them on the site so they left entirely.

It should be noted that the traffic to that site at that point was nearly 100% search traffic looking for a specific data point and the content on the page was tables of data, not an article. I would assume that a site with an engaging article would have a much smaller bounce rate.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#133

Post by patio11 »

rfrey wrote: post #23

I'm struggling with this now and I could use some insight. I absolutely share OP's loathing of these pop-ups. On the other hand, I'm just starting to try to drive traffic to my physical-product website (through PPC ads, facebook marketing, etc). I KNOW I need to try to collect some contact information. But I cannot find a way to do it that isn't appalling. - Collect on landing page? How do they know if they want to s…

I sort of like the Drip widgets (http://getdrip.com) and there exist numerous Javascript things which can do roughly the same.

I don't have much experience with physical products and am not sure this generalizes, but in SaaS, one of the best ways to get opt-ins with advertising is to:

a) Send the ad not to a landing page but rather to content pitched in the ad

b) Have a further incentive which takes the piece it's attached to and deepens it. Gate this one with an email submit.

c) You generally want to get to a state where you have N content pieces, M creatives for the premium (downloadable whitepaper or whatever), and P premiums, where N >> M >> P. Then you can start testing to find which ads/content/house ad creatives/premiums get you the best results. It works perfectly adequately with N = M = P = 1 though.

This works particularly well with retargeting. You get someone to visit your site once or a few times organically (your content was on HN or Twitter or what have you), you cookie them up, and some day when they're browsing Facebook your company (which they already trust to give them useful info) says "Hey, more stuff for you to read of interest to you." They come over, read for a bit, and hand over the email address semi-casually. Your marketing and sales processes now take over.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#134

Post by emodendroket »

mikeash wrote: post #115
emodendroket wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the costs of doing it are close to nothing and there's a pretty reasonable chance it is effective there is no reason not to do it. I also find your analysis less likely than the OP's.

The cost is in potentially scaring other people away because you annoy them too much. I think the potential there is fairly high.

But there are ways to get a reasonable measure of that, particularly if you at one point did not have them. Yeah, sure, it's probably not good enough to get into a peer reviewed journal, but little of the data you have when running a typical Web site is.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#135

Post by emodendroket »

mplscoder wrote: post #117
emodendroket wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent; now 98% of users will never see it.

If they didn't read to the bottom, they probably aren't interested in the product enough to sign up for an email.

That's just not that true. People rather frequently do things like share articles they only bothered to read half of on Facebook; there's no reason to think they wouldn't want a newsletter or a product. c.f. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/...

> Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#136

Post by JoeAltmaier »

gk1 wrote: post #125
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's cynical. You want HNers to spread the word, so they get a sanitized version? That's borderline creepy. Now I recommend a site, and the people I recommend to are thinking I'm an idiot for recommending an ad-riddled site.

No. I'm slightly customizing the experience for a certain group of visitors. Do you find web analytics creepy? Or A/B tests? Or cookies? If you think your browsing behavior isn't affecting what you're served on a site, then you're in for a surprise...

You can pretend its not a cynical attempt to mislead a critical segment into recommending your site, though they wouldn't if they knew what it was really like. I'm an HNer. This is personal, so its creepy.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#137

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Alupis wrote: post #126
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Netflix is the larger part of the internet. That has nothing to do with me.

You provide one example of a single website out of millions that does not use a popup, and claim QED? Like stated before... you are letting your personal bias creep into a pseudo-fact.

'A single website' that is the largest single fraction of the entire internet traffic, yes. And what's with the 'pseudo' slam?

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#138

Post by JoeAltmaier »

notdanariely wrote: post #129
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Netflix is the larger part of the internet. That has nothing to do with me.

In case you aren't just being argumentative, using bandwidth as the metric of choice when discussing lightbox-style page elements is sub-optimal. Or when discussing business models of websites that use those page elements. A better metric is some sort of pageviews / site visitors / uniques / etc.

Come on. Netflix is the single largest consumer of the Internet. Any metric you want to name. Consumer interactions being the most important. They beat other video-on-demand services by a large margin. And most of those others have popups (or forced ads injected into the content). And Netflix beats them all. You understand the argument.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#139

Post by fanf2 »

Is there enough commonality in the way these popups work that would make it easy to kill them automatically?

The problem is this is likely to cause problems for image light boxes. I hate those too (I would prefer a slideshow on a separate page) but unlike stupid popups they are necessary for the working of the site.

Re: F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

#140

Post by notdanariely »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #138
notdanariely wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you aren't just being argumentative, using bandwidth as the metric of choice when discussing lightbox-style page elements is sub-optimal. Or when discussing business models of websites that use those page elements. A better metric is some sort of pageviews / site visitors / uniques / etc.

Come on. Netflix is the single largest consumer of the Internet. Any metric you want to name. Consumer interactions being the most important. They beat other video-on-demand services by a large margin. And most of those others have popups (or forced ads injected into the content). And Netflix beats them all. You understand the argument.

You have honestly lost me. Not only am I unsure of any argument you set forth except "Netflix is the biggest consumer of the internet", but I can name many metrics by which they aren't top 10. Namely, pageviews, unique visitors, alexa rank, or just about any other metric that doesn't measure bandwidth.

Are you only discussing VOD sites? That's the only way I can make any sense of your arguments. (Also, what do you mean by netflix being a "consumer of the internet"?)

[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/netflix.com]

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