F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it
thosefuckingpopups.tumblr.com
thosefuckingpopups.tumblr.com
Here's a real example:
In March I added a delayed popup to my blog to invite people to subscribe for future updates about user acquisition. It was on a delayed timer so that the reader has a chance to at least get part-way through the post. Also, if you closed it out once then you wouldn't see it again for something like 30 days.
Since then, it's been seen by 11,848 people, of whom 232 (1.96%) signed up.
Most blog readers come for the article, not for the blog or the company. They read the article then carry on with their lives, even if the article was very helpful or interesting to them.
Here's how I see it: I now have 232 people who are actually interested in learning about user acquisition, and gave me permission to send them more helpful posts. I wouldn't have this if I never asked them to enter their email. I realize the price to pay for this is mildly annoying the other 98%.
With that said, I'm trying to minimize that annoyance. I'm now experimenting with a less invasive prompt; a thin bar at the top of the screen, that also hides when you're scrolling down (presumably reading). If it still gets subscribers _and_ is less annoying to the others, then I'll keep it.
tl;dr - Companies know and don't care that popups are annoying, because they're effective. Some companies care a little and try to make the popups less annoying to those who wouldn't have signed up anyway.
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 scarce, but sales resources can be. Now they don't have to have someone call you, don't have you in their denominator lowering their conversion-to-sales rate, etc.
Perhaps it's just a way for both reader and publisher to see if they're a match.
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.
If you put up a prompt saying "enter your e-mail address" then a lot of people will obey regardless of your reason for prompting. Most computer users don't really understand computers and have no idea when a site would legitimately require an e-mail address and when a site just wants it so they can send you spam. This is especially true when you use a popup that blocks access to the page. It would be easy to assume that signing up is required in order to continue reading the page.
So if anyone did enter their email just to continue, they're not counted in that 232. I don't think that's likely, though, since the message was clear about what it is:
> Want more users?
> OK, that was a cheap trick. Of course you do.
> The real question is... Do you want to learn the hard way, or would you rather get battle-tested lessons and case studies about user acquisition sent to you about once monthly?
> [Yes, keep me updated](button)
I agree, though, that many companies are doing this absolutely wrong, and one of the ways to get it wrong is not being clear about the value of entering your email.
It looks to me like you're suffering from the base rate fallacy. You're basically saying, it's unlikely to sign up by accident, therefore most of my signups are intentional. But because the number of people who signed up is very small compared to the number of people who visited, that's not how it works.
Let's say that people sign up by accident with a probability of 1%. (We might break that down by saying that, for example, 10% of people who visit think that entering their e-mail address is mandatory, and 10% of people who receive the verification e-mail click the link either by accident or because they think they have to somehow.) That might seem like a nice low rate and thus almost all of your 232 signed up intentionally. Not so! If 0.2% of people sign up by accident then that means that 118 people signed up by accident, giving you about 50% of your people who signed up doing so by accident. If the accidental signup rate is 2% then that means there are no legitimate signups at all in that 232. I have no real idea what the true rate would be, but 1-2% is plausible to me, and so I don't think you can conclude anything about how well this stuff works from this information.
If people are entering their e-mails and clicking a verification link without wanting to receive e-mails it's absolutely their own damn fault and I don't care.
Any time you prompt the user without their asking and they put up nothing of value, the false positive rate will probably be relatively high. If only a small proportion of people sign up, then a small false positive rate (compared to the total number of visitors) can dominate. Thus I don't think the numbers given demonstrate effectiveness, and you shouldn't use something that doesn't demonstrate effectiveness.
I'm a little surprised this opinion has turned out to be so controversial.
How many of those 11,848 people didn't finish your article? Do you care?
And now, as I mentioned, I'm experimenting with a different type of prompt that I hope will lower that risk.
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...
I'm all for adblockers... but to say that ads can't be unobtrusive and effective is ignoring the fact that they are obviously worth the effort.
I pretty much gave up on TV because of the commercials.
To me this does not make sense, and is exactly the reason I avoid annoying users in my applications (advertising or otherwise). Because you definitely have numbers to back up the effectiveness of the popup (although I would argue it is not effective). What you don't have is of the 98% you annoyed, how many will not return because of the annoyance (by choice anyway).
Or to put in another way,
Would you implement a feature in your software that only benefitted 2% and annoyed the 98%?
Seems like this kind of approach hints at a deeper issue here and that's effective targeting.
The software analogy is invalid, because those people are already your users or customers. In the case of reading the article, think of a popup as a criterion filter in much the same way as 419 scammers use poor english.
Just because it's mildly annoying, doesn't make them any less effective either. There wouldn't be millions spent on Super Bowl slots if they weren't effective (although the SB is an outlier with regards to adverts).
Except for really bad popups, I can find an x, click it and move on - or ever so occasionally actually sign up for something...
It hasn't been until recently that you could timeshift or torrent TV shows consistently to not see the commercials. They do show that mildly annoying can still be effective and profitable.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm not so concerned about people who left. If a small popup is enough to make them leave, then they weren't interested enough in the article to begin with. But still, if I find that the less-invasive method is just as effective then I'll be happy.
There is something about doing user acquisition on a blog about user acquisition that I find strangely amusing... and perhaps your visitors have already become desensitised to it, as this is what they're looking for.
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 though because only 2.6% of users scrolled low enough to trigger it.
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.
With me, at least, there'd be some chance that I'd sign up in that situation, rather than no chance whatsoever.
I really wonder who these people are who will sign up before even seeing the site, and whether that group actually represents real customers. Maybe if your product is aimed at the terminally clueless?
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 sign up, they just got here.
- Put on Contact Us page? Nobody will see it.
- Pop up a window after 30 seconds, or three pages viewed, or whatever? I end up on thosefuckingpopus.tumbler.com, and for good reason.
- Don't do anything? Patrick McKenzie finds my house and draws rude things on my face while I sleep.
Has anybody come up with an acceptable design solution for collecting emails from people who are interested in being on your list?
The two main mistakes that you must avoid at all cost are:
1. displaying an overlay on page load, forcing the user to make the decision before consuming any content,
2. showing the overlay while the user is reading the main content; nobody likes to be interrupted.
> 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.
Remember you are not the best case when deciding what is effective at capturing your audience. You are more "internet savvy" or whatever...
Popups, email marketing, retargeted ads, et al are very, very effective means of capturing an audience online.
The rest of the Internet is pay-to-play like Steam. At least for me.
You are not the average internet user.
Your biases do not apply to 99% of internet users. The things on websites that annoy you do not annoy 99% of internet users. The marketing antics that work for 99% of internet users do not work on you.
Like stated before... you are letting your personal bias creep into a pseudo-fact.
> And what's with the 'pseudo' slam?
You are making up facts to support your skewed and biased view. You don't like popups that ask for email addresses, therefore you assert they are ineffective and annoying to all users. This is absurd, and provably false.
You assert Netflix has the most consumption of bandwidth for a single service on the internet, and they don't employ a popup to collect email addresses... and therefore conclude that nobody should use a popup to collect email addresses. This is equally absurd.
A better metric is some sort of pageviews / site visitors / uniques / etc.
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"?)
I don't believe that's true. What we see here is an exhibit of the False-Consensus Effect[1]. You believe they are annoying, and many on HN believe they are annoying, therefore they (popups) must be annoying to everyone. This logic ignores the fact that 99% of web users are not technical, and view the web in an entirely different light.
On ecommerce websites, popup forms are incredibly effective at capturing customer email addresses later used in direct email marketing. So effective, there is an entire industry built around providing the technology and controls to target certain customers with the popups (viewed 6 pages but did not add anything to cart yet, sat on a product page for 2 minutes, etc...).
For a lot of popups, an incentive is offered to the potential customer. Give us your email address and we'll give you 5% off your next purchase. We're basically buying the right to email market to you... understanding full well that some customers will be annoyed with the popup, and some might even provide fake details. But for the majority of customers, we just bought their loyalty. They will make a purchase with their new 5% off coupon, and will likely shop the site again when we email them promo offers later on.
If you visited one of my sites, and got annoyed by the popup, then I'd be OK with that... you were not my target. But if your parents or grandparents visited my site... chances are they'd fill out the popup. They are my target.
I haven't but I've seen non-nerds get irritated by popups. Heck, given that their primary complaint about computers is that they're confusing, the last thing they want is for popups to confuse them further.
[EDIT] Here's a study that agrees with me:
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/most-hated-advertising-techn...
I can't find the actual source, though, if a source even exists.
All the arguments above are about the site, not about the visitor. "capturing customer email", "Buying the right to email market" are not about the visitor gaining value by reading a blog entry. And those who object to the process are "not my target". Very convenient. Perhaps I was a whale with a blank check, reading the blog entry to find out more. One popup and now I'm gone. You'll never know, since you've already convinced yourself this is all ok.
You don't run websites (especially ecommerce websites) hoping and praying for a "whale" to come along and bless you with their deep pockets... just like you don't play baseball hedging on hitting only home runs. That's a recipe for failure.
> Its self-serving to stick a dialog box in somebody's face
Yes, that's the point. I want their email addresses.
> then spend 100's of words defending that choice by denying the obvious.
Frankly, you cannot argue with the effectiveness of popup email collection. Every time we blast our 150,000+ email marketing list (mostly gathered via the popup as well as other means), the websites are almost crushed under the traffic load. 1 email can generate $10's of thousands in revenue... so yes, collecting emails is of very high importance for us, and many similar ecommerce companies.
> are not about the visitor gaining value by reading a blog entry
You are certainly right -- it's more about the company gaining value, however, a great many of our customers gain value by seeing deals on products they are interested in. That is a win-win for everyone.
> And those who object to the process are "not my target".
If you aren't buying something from my site, or clicking an ad, then you are not my target. Instead you are just consuming my company's resources and ultimately won't convert into a sale. To be frank, we don't want those types of visitors on the website, although it's unavoidable (ecommerce generally considers an average 3-5% conversion rate to be good).
The point is, you are annoyed by popups, and choose to punish sites that employ them. Just like some choose to punish sites that provide free content but pay the bills with ads. It's a strong bias to impose on the rest of the internet users... especially when you are in the minority percentile.
Some demos:
Put the form at the bottom of the content. Presumably those who have read through and like it will then sign up.
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.
The new crop of lightboxed modal popups that are now ubiquitous are 100 times worse since they:
- are modal
- often work poorly on mobile
- have as many different dismiss mechanisms as there are popups
- web marketers love them
Maybe a Machine Learning model to prevent scripts from executing if the classifier indicates it will spawn a lightbox...
But it quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse game.
"I don't fucking know if I like this article, you're interrupting me while I'm still in the middle of reading it!"
But while we're on the topic, the recent trend of "No thanks, I don't want to get all this awesome stuff" or "No, I don't want to become a master in subject X" buttons are very condescending.
I had a small deals aggregator site which got most of its traffic from Google. When users landed I knew they were interested in the content, and I showed it through a semi-transparent background and forced them to enter their emails before being able to click through. I remember conversions going from 10-20 new emails per day to over 100 emails per day.
1. Am I measuring the quality of the email addresses before an after the introduction of the popup?
2. Am I measuring the number of visitors who abandoned my site (closed my page) immediately after I interrupted their visit with my popup?
Ultimately, the question ought to be: what am I really measuring? Is it the number of new rows in my emails table or the impact on brand perception and ultimately bottom line?
I never got around to emailing the leads, but I know the lock screen did not stop people. Assuming 50% were invalid, that is still an additional 50+ new leads daily.
I think we (people similar to the HN crowd) care about things many people don't care about. Things such as Design, UX, etc...
What I hate the most are those install alerts, during page load, which then ends up being a phonegap/cordoba of SAME site (!)
..or to be redirected to "m.example.com" because they think that an special diminished experience best fit for my perfectly capable phone
You might piss off one person, but 10 more sign up. You decide if it's worth it or not.
The current top post says he has a 1.96% success rate.
So it's more like "piss off 98 people, sign up 2". I'm not convinced that's worth it.
If you only care about the text on a page, Readability will pull it out and show it to you in a plain style. https://www.readability.com/ Safari already has this built-in, and it's in Firefox Beta so it should be in the next shipping version.
Though I'm waiting for something like NoScript that allows JS modification to remove annoyances like this.
Not even if you leave the site and come back. Not even with share=1. You have to ban it from using your Google account to regain control.
Edit: So I revoked access through my Google Account, and it's still doing it. Emailed privay@quora.com to see if they can help.
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.
I manage a host file that redirects any site I run across that gives me a popup back to my home page. I refuse to visit these sites - even if the popup is a one-time-only thing (which it isn't for those of us who clear cookies)
I think "signing up" needs editing, it's not idiomatic English (at least to my non-native ears).
Perhaps "naming and shaming", heh.