Popups

popup menus

[shady]

I have an affiliate site which contains a large number of pages and deep links at a product level to the supplier.

I wish to perform a "javascript popup" IF the customer leaves my site backwards or by closing the window.

The only way I know to do this, is to bring up my site in a frame and use onUnload in the body tag.

Does anyone have a "better" way to do this - preferably without the use of a frame?

[tedster]

Some ideas for exit popups were discussed in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

And a site search for "exit popup" turns up some other approaches as well. Lots to pick through.

[madcat]

What are valid uses for an exit popup? I can understand a form asking how the service was or maybe...nope, that's all I can think of honestly.

About 99% of the exit pop-ups I've seen are distracting and enough not to go back to a site. But perhaps I'm shutting out a function that I could use to give a better experience somehow.

[dhdweb]

At times I will use one of these pesky criters to get input from visitors as to usability of a new site.

somthing to the effect of:

Thank you for visiting our new site!
We want our customers to have the best
possible experience while visiting us online.
Please take a moment to rate the overall
usability and layout of this site.

etc. ect. you get the idea!

This lets you know if you need to fix anything.

On average, I get very little good comments, because if the user did not have any trouble, they don't take the time to tell you, but if they did have a problem and you put this pop-up in thier face you will here about it!

So when you get NO replies from the pop-up after a month or so, you know your job is done and you take the pop-up down.

dhdweb

[txbakers]

The frameset idea for catching the exit works, but it's very user unfriendly because whenever the user clicks refresh it returns to the frameset page, not the page they were looking at.

I'm still searching for a reliable way to track when they log off a site as well. Login is easy - I write a DB when they sign in. It's the leaving that is tricky. If they click "Exit" I can get them, but if they just close the browser I'm beat.

[DrCool]

A customer of ours had a newsletter sign up on his site and was getting a decent amount of signups. He put an exit popup on promoting his newsletter and his signups tripled. Even though I hate them they can be effective if used correctly.