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Google Studies How Bad Interstitials Are On Mobile
An anonymous reader writes: A Google study of their own Google+ site and app found that 69% of visitors abandoned the page when presented with the app interstitial. Google said it was getting rid of them and asked others to do the same. TechCrunch reports: "It's worth noting that Google's study was small scale, since the company was only looking at how an interstitial promoting the Google+ social service native app performed (and we don't know how many people it surveyed). It may very well be the case that visitors really didn't want the Google+ app specifically — and that Google+ itself is skewing the data. (Sadly Google is not offering comparative stats with, say, the Gmail app interstitial, so we can but speculate.)"
i didnt know the term either, but after looking it up i agree
when I am on my phone there are 2 types of pages that if i get them, i refuse to go to again
sites with popups that dont get blocked by adblock, no i dont care about what you are trying to sell me, show me what i asked for
the other is "list" sites, where they have a list that might have 10 photos and no (or very little text) yet they want me to load a new page for each item on the list. It is even worse if i can go to the site from a desktop and not have the page split over 10 pages so why do it to me on mobile? I know why (ads) and I dont care. I dont want to a - waste my time clicking next after i look at each slide for 5 seconds, and B i dont want to waste my phones data package on a bunch of ads, that take up more data than the content im looking for to begin with!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It'd be nice if Google could detect and downrank these sites. They should probably also do that for any site that gives you a significantly different page if it detects the google webcrawler versus any other agent. And as long as I'm asking, also pages that require Javascript to render. Downrank the lot because clicking on them is just a waste of my time anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I wonder how many of these 69% abandonment were due to user error in trying to get rid of the damn thing. Especially on mobile platforms where the ad can take up the entire browser screen and the back button has no effect on it. When something unexpected happens and you end up on an unexpected page the logical thing to do is hit back. Unfortunately for this stupid advertising the back button has the result of leaving the page altogether to go to the previous one.
I'm quite bad at that. It takes a conscious effort on my part to make it past these popups the first time without accidentally leaving the page. I hope their statistics took that into account.
Actually I don't, I hope their numbers are over inflated and this stupid practice crashes and burns.