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.)"

Comments

How many people can't get rid of these things?

[thegarbz]

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.