If you search for information concerning pop-up ads on Google, you will discover a lot of results such as “pop-up blocker” or “how to disable pop-ups”.
Many websites use these types of ads and, on one hand, it is a very useful marketing instrument because it guarantees that visitors definitely see your ad message, but, on the other hand, most ads that pop up annoy people and they want to block them. In this article, we will identify “how to” make effective ads that pop up.
Steps to Make Effective Pop-up Ad Marketing Work
In our online store, you can find the extension for Magento ® – GoMage Ads & Promo which allows implementing the pop-up window on the necessary page of the Magento ® store.
Our customers have mixed opinions about this extension and its effectiveness, but some of them have had a positive experience. You can find several recommendations below on how to achieve this.
1. Provide pop-up ads at the right time. It is very important for you to analyze. Let’s review some examples.
Visitors enter an online store and start to search for products. In 10 seconds a pop-up window appears and visitors are asked to share on Facebook or subscribe to a newsletter. This is a very bad approach. At this moment, visitors just start to get acquainted with the online store and don’t know whether they like it or not. It is wrong timing to provide advertising via popup at this stage of the game.
When visitors are ready to complete purchases and go to checkout procedure, it is obvious that they like the online store, but it is also not the right time for pop-up ads. Advertising can distract the users from buying and this fact will cause cart abandonment. At the checkout stage, users must fill in important fields related to payment cards, delivery and so on. Pop-up windows may interfere and cause users to make mistakes and give invalid information.
There are different stages of interaction with the online store and it is important to identify which stage your buyer is before offering the pop-up ad so it is not annoying to them. The common recommendation is that pop-ups should be postponed during the buying cycle.
2. Provide pop-up ads in the right place. The pop-up window can emerge in the middle of the page and obstruct content. But there should be a strong reason to do this; otherwise, the advertising is annoying. Don’t think that people are blind, and the pop-up window can be placed on the left or right side of the page. Also, the appropriate design of pop-up ads plays a huge role. It should attract but not irritate. The common recommendation is to make the design calm and organically fitted into the web page.
3. Give a clear opportunity to refuse the advertisement. The button to close the ad should appear immediately, along with the advertising message. It is your user’s right to refuse to be advertised to. A forcible way of advertising doesn’t work effectively and is usually perceived as disrespectful to customers.
4. Never implement inappropriate pop-ups. There are two types of advertising that can be here:
- Spam ads, such as: “Congratulations! You are the 100.000th user and you won …”
Even if it is the truth, people will not trust such information because these techniques have been used as SPAM for too long and have brought too much skeptism from the viewer.
- Irrelevant pop-ups. You can predict what kind of products can be interesting for users who are staying on a certain page for a long time. The section “You might also like” is able to help you to attract the users’ attention to relevant items in an online store. But if you want to make a stronger emphasis, it is possible to use pop-ups with appropriate information. That means if the visitor searches for a new iPad, the pop-up window with information about discounts on vacuum cleaners will be irrelevant. To force advertising over and above your customers experience is a very bad practice.
5. Don’t use pop-up ads on each page. Advertising abuse will definitely not be efficient. One ad to support a certain marketing campaign is enough. Think twice if you like to add more ads to your online store.
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How to test your pop-up ads
There are some recommendations for how you are able to check if the pop-up ads work effectively.
- Traffic to your online store. Traffic may increase if there are some active campaigns to attract new users. It is recommended to test pop-up ads before other campaigns because in this way it is easier to analyze the impact.
- Bounce Rate of your online store. It is the most important indicator to give you a clear picture about how pop-ups work. If this parameter is increasing, the advertising has a negative impact and you have to stop it.
- Time on the page/pages per visit. If visitors leave the store quicker or visit fewer pages compared to the past periods, these are also good indicators to reveal the negative impact. Pay more attention to the webpage where the ad pops ad is implemented.
- Conversion rates. Even if no negative effects were identified, the conversion rate should be analyzed carefully. If this indicator is not changing compared to previous periods, most likely this ad does not have either positive or negative influence and it is better to stop or modify it.
The pop-up ad is one of the many marketing instruments that can be used to increase sales. And such marketing campaigns can be successful if you know all of the features of popup advertising.
