Pop-Ups - What They Are and Why To Use Them
Published on July 16, 2017
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Yesterday, one of our community members received some negative feedback on what I personally thought was a cute and creative pop-up. Her experience led me to consider how I use pop-ups and what "best practices" might be out there in the online marketing industry. So I did a little research, and this is Part 1 of what I learned.
Pop-ups, or convertibles, as they are also called, are those messages that come up on your screen when you are visiting a website.
There are different types of pop-ups:
- convertibles that slide out from top, side or bottom
- convertibles that pop over in the middle of the page
- convertibles that behave differently in different circumstances, for example, if you are getting ready to leave the page
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There are also different purposes for pop-ups:
- to capture email addresses to generate a list. This is the most common form of pop-up.
- to generate click through. With these, you are encouraging visitors to click through to another page; therefore, your pop up is not going to have an "opt in" box, but will have an invitation message of some kind.
- to conduct a survey. You can use the information gathered to gai qualitative feedback from users.
- to take specific action, such as fill our a form or request a download
Pop-ups have a reputation for being those "annoying things" that jump out at you and ruin your experience. You do not want your viewers to become frustrated, so these are some things you should avoid:
- convertibles where it is very difficult to find the x to close them
- convertibles that are timed and you cannot close until that time has passed
- too many popups in succession that negatively affects the visitors' ability to read content
- convertibles that are not concerned with the users' interest
Google is starting to weigh in on sites that use pop-ups, and have laid out some guidelines specific to mobile sites, posting that site rankings may be negatively affected if they contain:
- pop-ups that are "intrusive", meaning ones that take over the entire screen
- pop-ups that come up immediately when you come on to websites
In the same post, Google said that acceptable pop-ups use a reasonable amount of screen space and do not immediately pop-up.
Do you use pop-ups on your sites and why?
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