Pop-up Advertising: Hated but Effective

Despite the frustration associated with pop-up advertising, latest figures for effectiveness suggest it's here to stay...

Most users loathe pop-ups (those adverts that launch in separate, usually small, browser windows and stall the rest of the site appearing until they have finished their own downloading). Some ISPs have supported users' hatred of them by working to eliminate them. Unfortunately, a small group of users occasionally feel positive towards them - the ones who happen to be interested in the particular advert at the particular time. There is no way of knowing in advance who those people are, but they are using pop-ups to access more information about products and services than they would if the information had arrived as part of the main page.

Advertising.com's study highlights online advert performance by frequency of impression, creative size and format, measured across Advertising.com's network of over 1,900 websites. Testing of over 15M users served more than 168 million impressions during a one-week period showed that 728x90 banners had a lower conversion rate than standard 468x60 banners, while pop-ups and skyscrapers had higher conversion rates. Pop-ups were 13 times more effective in generating clicks and conversions than the standard banners.

Those figures are hard to argue with in terms of effectiveness and as they are now circulating the industry with Advertising.com's conclusions that pop-ups are the best creative format for generating consumer conversions, it looks as if we will just have to put up with the new format.

Pop-up use is increasing, though they are still only responsible for less than 5% of all online advertising. According to Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance unit, publishers served 13.4 billion pop-up ads in the first quarter, a 24% increase from the previous quarter. Advertising.com's study found that adverts lose their effectiveness when impression levels rise above a certain point, with one to five impressions generating the best revenue return.

I guess the best hope for the death of the pop-up is that overuse in the wake of these findings might lead to falling conversion figures.

Associated Link: Advertising.com

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