In "Why Pop-Ups are Pop-Bad", we looked at
pitfalls of pop-up advertising, most significant of them being way Internet surfers feel about pop-ups. As I mentioned in that previous article, when you use pop-ups, you take risk of your visitor count suffering and 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 only possibility to either make your visitors feel frustrated or drop your pop-ups? While your users would probably want to see pop-ups disappear completely, that is not always possible. However, by making some slight changes to 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 site has to offer. When you open next page, same pop-up comes up. Again, one click from your mouse and it is gone. On to next page and darn thing pops up yet again! Now you're getting annoyed and start looking for exit.
OK, you probably didn't have to imagine that. If you've been on web for a while, you're likely to have experienced it. Having 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 site seem very unfriendly.
The moral of story? Use cookies to identify your visitors and limit amount of times same pop-up is shown to same user. Although it is claimed that on average, a person has to see same ad several times before he'll react to it, enough is enough.
