Keeping Your Pop-Ups - and Your Audience

In "Why Pop-Ups are Pop-Bad", we looked at the pitfalls of
pop-up advertising, the most significant of them being the way
Internet surfers feel about pop-ups. As I mentioned in that
previous article, when you use pop-ups, you take the risk of
your visitor count suffering and the reputation of your site
being damaged. Despite that, many use pop-ups on their sites
for a variety of reasons and are reluctant to cease using an
advertising method they feel to be effective.

So, what is there to do? Is the only possibility to either make
your visitors feel frustrated or drop your pop-ups? While your
users would probably want to see the pop-ups disappear
completely, that is not always possible. However, by making some
slight changes to the way you use pop-ups, you can often achieve
a result that satisfies both you and your visitors.

Maximum benefit, minimum trouble
================================

There are multiple ways to make your pop-ups more user friendly,
here are some of my favorites. Try them out and see which ones
work for you.

1. Imagine this. You arrive at a site and a pop-up ad appears.
Being a veteran web-user, you close it quickly and continue
investigating what the site has to offer. When you open the
next page, the same pop-up comes up. Again, one click from
your mouse and it is gone. On to the next page and the darn
thing pops up yet again! Now you're getting annoyed and start
looking for the exit.

OK, you probably didn't have to imagine that. If you've been
on the web for a while, you're likely to have experienced it.
Having the pop-up appear once didn't feel as bad, but when
you had already looked at it and decided that you weren't
interested in what it advertised, having it come up again and
again made the site seem very unfriendly.

The moral of the story? Use cookies to identify your visitors
and limit the amount of times the same pop-up is shown to the
same user. Although it is claimed that on average, a person
has to see the same ad several times before he'll react to
it, enough is enough.

2. Do not use more than one pop-up on a single page. Using
multiple pop-ups is unlikely to greatly increase the response
rate to your advertising, but it will ensure that the
patience of your visitors wears thin a lot faster. A horde of
pop-ups appearing at the same time may crash some browsers
and slow older computers down to a crawl.

3. Consider launching your pop-ups at the moment users exit
your site rather than when they arrive to it. This is likely
to make your advertisements seem less distracting, because at
that point your visitors have already finished using your
site and found the information they were looking for.

If you choose to use exit pop-ups, remember that they offer
an excellent opportunity to retain contact with a visitor
that may otherwise be lost in cyberspace. A pop-up to
bookmark your site or subscribe to your newsletter is likely
to work better at this stage, as the user has already seen
that you run a high-quality site.

4. Just like all other forms of advertising you use, your
pop-ups should offer content that is relevant to the topic of
your site. For example, it's a much better idea to have a
pop-up that sells subscriptions to Sports Illustrated on your
Boston Bruins fan site than a pop-up for an Internet casino.
Not only does it get a better response rate, but it also
makes your site to look more professional.

5. Every time you add pop-up advertisements or adjust existing
ones, keep a close eye on how your audience reacts to the
changes. Your visitor count, the time an average visitor
spends on your site and the number of page views per visitor
are all important meters that will promptly notify you of
any possible problems.