Success with popup/popunder advertising

Seems to be working

[vibgyor79]

I am making this post from purely an affiliate/website publisher's point of view. Like many others, I personally don't like popups and its cousins (popunders etc).

From the past one month, I have been experimenting with popup/popunder advertisements and it seems to be working for certain type of affiliate programs - pay per lead - mostly financial products like credit cards, loans etc.

Because of the design of the popup/popunder window (No flashy graphics, a simple web form with just five fields and a SUBMIT button), the conversion rates have been better than direct PPC advertising. I must mention however that these are "targeted popups" - that is, the surfers were genuinely interested in financial products.

Any thoughts/comments?

[Drastic]

I definitely think popups are a great tool when used appropriately and sparingly.

Certain instances they do a great job of getting the user's attention when you need it most, for interaction with your site. The problem is, most people use them for cheap advertising, don't set cookies for one-time popups, and spawn pop after pop.

So, they get a bad name, but you shouldn't be afraid to use them. Just be very careful with your implementation.

[jbsmith]

Pop ups work great for getting subscribers to your own
opt-in list, which can then be used to market your
affiliate programs through the use of eCourses,
autoresponder sales letters or newsletters.

This way, you can market to your list again and again
for different affiliate programs.

Cheers...

Jeff

[rogerd]

I agree with Jeff. One site I work with has an opt-in list. A popunder invites them, but only once (cookie check). No complaints on the popunder.

[xunker]

As a publisher, I've found at least financial success with displaying untargeted popups -- that is, I've made a lot of money without annoying the users too much. There is the trend (that I follow now, too) of only displaying a popup to a particular user per time period, and users are forgiving of this idea.

However, my ad provider shows statistics of clickthus and such as well and while I may show 50,000 popups/unders a day, the statistics show that less than 1/2 of 1% are clicked.. It's still a large amount as untargeted popups go, but personally I feel it's not a good ROI for the advertisers (of course, far be it from me to object to advertisers flinging money ar me).

In terms of ROI, I still have to tip the hat to Text Ads which have had, depending on target, anywhere from 1% to 3% CTR.

My take on this is not so much targeting, however, but public opinion; People hate popups and many will not even look at them out of principal because they feel that clicking a popup will only encourage that kind of intrusiveness; with textads it's opposite, where people are willing to click the ad because of its unintrusiveness and people find that compelling.