How many of those click-throughs are from mis-clicking the Close Window icon and clicking on the ad instead, or how many of those pop-ups are deceptively designed to look like legitimate Windows messages?

How many tell the novice user that their machine is under imminent attack and they have to click on it to save their machine?

How many embedded ads count closing the ad (if it is offered within the ad) as a click-through?

Posted by: Darin on June 2, 2003 08:35 AM

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How could Advertising.com announce that pop-up ads doesn't work?? :o)
Imho, it's a kind of biased research. Isn't??

Posted by: Fernando Salvi on June 2, 2003 09:39 AM

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How many of those click-throughs are from mis-clicking the Close Window icon and clicking on the ad instead

The key statistic in the article is not the click-through stat, it's the conversion stat. That means that 14 times as many users bought whatever it was that the ad was selling. That's a good indication that there's more to the finding than mis-clicks.

So I guess they're not going away. I'm going to have to find a strategy to prevent them that works on my Mac. I've already got one for the PC at work....

Posted by: ralph on June 2, 2003 10:06 AM

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I'm going to have to find a strategy to prevent them that works on my Mac. I've already got one for the PC at work....

Safari blocks popups.

Posted by: ken mohnkern on June 2, 2003 11:01 AM

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Note that there is no mention of what the rates actually are nor what the error rate for the study is, only that popups work better. From what I've seen elsewhere, the rates are incredibly low.

Posted by: Ron Zeno on June 2, 2003 05:04 PM

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I read somewhere (can't remember where, can anyone else?) that the most successful web adverts are text ads which are relevant to the content on / near which they appear. Google certainly seems to think so.

I suspect studies like the article's are biassed against text ads because such studies are conducted by advertising specialists, while successful text ads depend on marrying 2 pieces of good content.

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on June 3, 2003 06:28 AM

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Intrusive or not, annoying or not, it can work. You have to be willing to annoy a great portion of your customer base to use these - but there are many companies who firmly believe in getting sales at any cost. And as annoyed as customers may be, few ever take that annoyance into serious action.

In any case, if the ad IS well-targetted, a pop-up would draw attention to something the customer might need. If it fills a need, that outweighs the annoyance factor - in other words, if you desperately wanted a New Widget and all of a sudden an ad popped up right then and there offering it to you instantly (maybe even with a discount), you'd have to be preeettty mad NOT to click on it and buy the product in question.

Hardest thing to remember, especially for us high-savvy designer typers - we are N O T our customers.

Posted by: on June 3, 2003 11:45 AM

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