Are using popups on your site a good idea?

I was only having 1 or 2 popups per session on only one section of my site, but I prefer not to have one now as it only takes one popup to loose a visitor. What about if the page that the popup, popup's on is the first page the visitor comes to on your site from a major search engine. If he see's one popup then he/she may think that the whole site has popups and may just leave straight away.

 

well people have different opinions on popups .. for warez sites its the popups which get them money and for non-warez ( legal sites which we deal with ) popups are not gd // they make us loose the traffic // they are annoying .

 

Pop ups send a signal of unprofessionalism. Great content will eventually pay for itself through quality sponsors. I say this as I kill a pop-up on USAToday.com .... hmmmm

 

OK!

Another thing that I am starting to worry about is now that I have got rid of all the popups, I now have some banners that are rather in your face. In other words. When someone goes to my site one of the banner ads may be professional and look part of the site and then another will be flashing rappidly and saying something like "Congratulations, you have won a prize. Please click now to claim your prize".

What about banner ads like that? They seem to flash rather alot and could also make my site look unprofessional. Should I try to stop these ads from appearing some how. Also, I have a feeling that if I also kill these type of banner ads on my site then I will have hardly any revenue what so ever. I could be on something like $0.25 - $0.50 CPM, which is quite low considering that web hosting is costing me around $0.25 for every 1000 pageviews on my site roughly. So doing this, if my revenue drops to $0.25 CPM then I will not really be making a profit and I don't want to put a large amount of ads on my site. I prefer to keep it so that it doesn't look like as if it is a site just fill of ads.

I guess the main thing though is that I have got rid of the worst advertising method which is popups. Banner ads that are in your face or still quite bad, but not as bad as popups.

What do you guy's think I should do?

 

Which site are you referring to? Do you not use AdSense?

 

I personally dislike these banners and tend to see them as very unprofessional but there again thats just me.

 

I do use adsense. But I also use cpm banner ads on some parts of my site that doesn't earn much from Adsense.

These include the free online games section. I use to earn around $1.00cpm from using Adsense on this section using 3 of Adsense ad blocks. Now I have found that just using 1 Adsense ad block, I have cut down on the ads and am still earning around $0.80cpm. I previously also had 2 cpm banner ads from another network and still have them, which are earning me around $0.40-$1.20cpm each.

So I use to have 5 ads, but had to cut them down as I didn't want to over crowd my site with ads. I now have 3 ads on the pages. 1 adsense block and 2 cpm banner ads. Just some of the banner ads are a little in your face, but I don't want to get rid of them as the good ads actually make my site look quite nice plus I have designed the games page's for these ads to be included into them. I don't want to replace them ads with nothing as them spots will look empty.

 

That is also how I see them. But they are on the "Free Online Games" section of my site so I guess that may not be so bad. I have not got these banner ads on pages that have articles and things.

 

I really should have added that they do fit some sites like games, chat sites and more or less sites aimed towards the younger generation who usually couldnt care if a site looks professional or not - Myspace would be the perfect example of bad looking sites but seem to attract crowds of youngin's.

 

I guess they will be alright then as they are on my games part of the site and that is the only place I have them.

 

If you are strictly trying to drive serp traffic and ppc traffic and make as much money from each visitor as possible with no thought or consideration to repeat traffic, than pop-ups can be helpful in that process.

If you are attempting to build a useful website where you want people to come back to it again in the future, not nearly as good an idea.

 

I've honestly struggled with this issue too.

I have a site that gets 15-20K visitors a day; but being entertainment genre the AdSense doesn't pay too well and a lot of pages don't have AS at all to avoid potential TOS issues; so I've struggled with how to better monetize the site and pop-up traffic on the image results pages that get loads of traffic from Google and Yahoo image searches - has the little devil on the left shoulder and the angel on the right ... Instead, I've been launching new "like" sites and throwing up image banners to draw traffic and attention.

However, the type of other banners you're talking about don't reek as bad as popup/popunders, but they still take away some credibility of a site in most cases I think. Futher, people tend to automatically mentally block them when they see them I think.

 

When you say you have not got AS on some pages because of TOS issues. What sort of content does these pages have. Are they porn related or video related, etc.

I am thinking of adding video content to my site aswell as free online games. Would I be able to include Adsense on the video content pages.

 

No porn on the site; in a case where there's a thumbnail gallery, I have AS, but on the individual html pages that's just the larger image, I don't have any AS as it's not a content page - these however get a ton of traffic and are often the top entry pages into the site which is why I've tinkered with "pimping" out the traffic to popunder ads, but I continue to resist the urge

 

If your site is a totally free site aimed at people under the age of 24 I wouldn't be too afraid of having pop-ups on it. If it makes the most money for you try it out. Try different things with your advertising and make sure to keep it fresh.

However

If your site either sells a product or is aimed at 45+ year old people like Jim Guinn and Smyrl I would stay away from the popups and just stick to google ads or banners etc.

 

Well, I guess like me, quite a number of people would use popup blockers so it means that your popups would never be seen. Before I had popup blockers, I will just close popup before they are fully loaded.

Just keep your banners in your site proper.

 

I am using Pop Under, so it comes under the site, and not up

 

I still preview to not use any interestials, popups, popunders, etc. I prefer to just use ads that don't really get in the way of my visitors user experience.