Not too long ago, upon a friend’s recommendation, I’ve decided to give a new WordPress plugin a try. It was Super Popup, a neat little tool for creation and management of popups in a blog.
I must admit that in five and a half years of blogging, I have never served my readers a single popup. …Until a couple of weeks ago.
Based on my (very limited; but compelling enough of an) experience with popups, I will probably never use popups again.
I’ve run a basic level split test, serving two identical ads to my blog’s readers: one (version A) in a popup, another (version B) as a call to action inside of a blog post dedicated to the subject.
Version A (popup ad)
- Ran for nearly 9 days
- Seen by 4,212 visitors
- Generated 14 unique hits
Version B (in-text ad)
- Ran for 4.5 days
- Seen by 2,373 visitors
- Generated 45 unique hits
Here’s the corresponding screenshot:
In half the time the in-post ad generated 3.2 times more clicks than the not-so-annoying* popup. Of course, I could do more testing. But it seems like a no-brainer to me. Better do a dedicated blog post on a topic than pop up your message in your readers’ faces.
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* Bounce rate, actually, increased (by ≈2.4%) once the popup functionality was turned off.
I think pop up ads have become so popluar on web pages that people find them annoying and click off them straight away with out even looking. I do the same. I next to never look at a pop up and find them extremely annoying when i’m in the middle of reading something.