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Blake from Google posted a message, on Google's Inside AdWords Blog, explaining why Google Adwords doesn't allow us to run ads to pages that have pop-ups. He says: Well, we can sum up the answer to that in three words: bad user experience. Studies (such as the ones cited in The Most Hated Advertising Techniques by Jakob Nielsen) show that users truly dislike pop-ups, pop-unders and their ilk -- and (this is key to you as an advertiser) also tend to dislike sites that employ them. We want to ensure that our users have a very positive experience when they click on a relevant ad, and we suspect that you do too. Thank God we have Google to keep an eye on OUR customers' user experience. I know a bunch of companies that found pop-ups actually increased their sales, and have personally chatted with a sales rep at a hosting company that popped up a message asking me if I needed some assistance. What's next? Sorry, we have declined your ad because you have some misspelled terms on your site, and research has shown that typos are a bad user experience? Or, sorry Target, we have declined your ads for failure to use proper alt text to make your site accessible to our blind customers, and this could be a legal violation (they are being sued for this)... Oh protect us great Google from our design flaws, provide us free automatic A/B testing and multivariate testing tools that will automatically enhance our websites for the optimal user experience. Or maybe we should be optimizing our sites for conversions? Over at Google there has been a constant battle between revenue generation and user experience, remember when they turned off advertisers who shared the same display URL? Explaining to advertisers that this was done to provide the best overall user experience, clearly turning of some advertisers and having less bidders for spots didn't maximize their revenues. It's great that Google want's to help, but I can tell you there is nothing more frustrating than trying to market a company that has decided that it is their businesses best interest to run a sale and promote that sale via a POP notification on their site, and having Google disable your ads because the knew better than the merchant what was best for their business and their customers. Dear Google, You used to have a great system that automatically optimized itself with a great customer feedback loop. If customers found the ads to be relevant they clicked on them. Your quality score analysis of our sites and how we communicate to our customers has crossed the line and made your advertising system a bear to work with. Tail terms that were once $0.05 and had no advertisers on them and very few clicks are now showing up at $5.00 per click, ridiculous.... Our ad dollars are flowing to Yahoo and soon to MSN adCenter... Get back to basics... Sincerely, Your Advertisers Comments (6) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: ! Hot Topics | Affiliate Marketing | PPC Search Engine Marketing | SEM Company & Industry News
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Adam Viener
1. A Google Advertiser on April 7, 2006 12:56 PM writes...
Sorry guys, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. I appreciate the fact that Google does not allow adevertisers who use pop-ups. Just because a certain tactic increases revenue doesn't mean that you should do it. Take spyware for example. Lots of money in that. But it damages the image of the web. It scares away consumers and pisses people off. Should Google allow advertisers that install spyware? I think not. Same goes for pop-ups. They're like really pushy salesmen. To advanced shoppers (users) they are an annoyance - something that will keep them from ever coming back. Though they may be able to snag a few extra sales from inexperienced buyers, they leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. IMO, the web is better off without that crap and if Google wants to help get rid of it, more power to them.
As for my ad dollars, they are increasingly going over to Google. That's where the action is. Even more so as Yahoo and MSN split. Oh, and the quality control stuff that you dislike so much? Expect it from Yahoo soon: http://www.forbes.com/markets/emergingmarkets/2006/04/06/yahoo-0406markets10.html
Permalink to Comment2. Adam Viener on April 7, 2006 1:35 PM writes...
Thanks for your comments. I don't think the question is if Pop-ups are good or bad. I have seen some very bad implementation of Pop-ups, and I have seen some very good uses for both Pop-ups and exit Pop-ups and Pop-Unders. I'm just not sure if the decision to implement pop-ups or not should affect an website owner's ability to market that page on Google or not.
Next thing you know they will be auto-judging the website's content and navigation to decide if they should be able to advertise or not. Oh wait, they are doing that with their quality scores!
What's next? Sorry you have a competitive banner ad on your site that uses distracting animations, so your site is banned from paying Google for advertising?
As for Spyware, again there are some good uses and bad uses. Alexa is spyware but has widespread usage. UPromise uses spyware that customers install, some like it some don't. Should Amazon be banned from advertising on Google for owning Alexa? Should UPromise be banned?
Heck, I can't even promote fishing rods on Google at BassProShops because they happen to sell ammunition for hunting...
I just think they might be going too far...
I appreciate your comments, what does everyone else think?
Permalink to Comment3. Matt on April 11, 2006 3:19 PM writes...
I agree with the comment made above by "A Google Advertiser." I am tired of Google getting harped on simply because they are the industry leader. They innovate faster than any other company I know of with a $100B+ market cap. Allowing AdSense on pop-ups would associate Google with one of the most annoying parts of the Internet. Of course they are not going to allow that.
I don't think this has anything to do with Google trying to "protect us from ourselves." When did everyone develop a sense of entitlement for how Google allows us to leverage their tools? Google has revolutionized the Internet marketplace. Thousands of businesses now exist that would have never succeeded without AdWords or AdSense or any number of the dozens of other Google tools.
As a personal example, we have built our business around people's need to optimize ad copy on AdWords. Rather than complaining about Google's refusal to build an ad testing utility into their platform, we looked at it as an opportunity and created our own: www.betterppc.com.
I firmly support constructive critiques of Google's policies. However, I think this critique is misdirected. Google has a right to protect their brand as well as to govern where their customers' ads are shown.
That's my 2 cents. Reach me at matt@betterppc.com for conversation.
Permalink to Comment4. Adam Viener on April 12, 2006 9:22 AM writes...
Matt,
I wasn't suggesting that Google should allow adsense ads on Pop-ups, the issue I was making is not allowing sites to advertise their pages if that site utilizes any kind of pop-up notification on their pages for thier own internal purposes. That includes pop-ups on entry, exit, and popunders. I wasn't saying that any of these pop-ups should include Google ads in them.
Adam
Permalink to Comment5. Dave Cole on April 14, 2006 2:11 PM writes...
I feel that the best-of-breed solution for web browsing tools is the responsible way to manage pop-ups & -unders. Using a combination of Yahoo! toolbar w/ popup blocker, IE's built in popup blocker, and SiteAdvisor's toolbar plugin, I'm able to surf with confidence.
Google is trying to get in to the business of dictating what the internet should be, rather than staying with their original mission of organizing the world's information. Surfer's can and should use other tools to optimize their search experience.
Permalink to Comment6. Zip on April 29, 2006 12:22 PM writes...
I'm not sure that Google is doing the wrong thing here.
Users don't like pop-ups, and if you condition them to think that every time they click on a Google ad they're going to have their computers frozen up for five minutes while 27 pop-up windows show up, they'll stop clicking the ads entirely. That's not good for anyone.
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