When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor
cucumbertown.comLooking at all the hate toward sing-up overlays one can wonder why websites still do this. The answer is simple, an unfortunately very sad.
Users value content. That's what they visit the webpage for. However, businesses like this (i.e. the ones inventing ideas like sign-up overlays) do not care about the content. They might say they do, but that is a lie. Website content is only a means to an end - extracting money from users. It's a bait for the fish.
This fundamental mismatch of values is - I think - the main reason why people still can't get why websites implement annoying sign-up pop-ups and stuff. Such companies don't really want to provide value to their users, they only pretend they want, to the extent that maximizes profit.
I'm fine with people earning money and charging for their work. But I believe that this relationship should be up-front. Running heavy maths to figure out the optimal amount of pretending-we-care to maximize profits is not only annoying, but dishonest.
I wish there was a way to reward businesses that actually focus on benefit to their customers, while punishing the ones who only pretend. Right now the only thing I can do, whenever I see annoying sign-up box or other signs of someone doing "clever things" to extract money from me, is to say "fuck you, I'm not coming back".
As for the usability part, [0] summed it up perfectly:
"(...) you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message."
Good businesses don't care about the content the same way that Michaelangelo didn't care about content: he would paint, or sculpt, or whatever. Whatever the patron would pay for.
Naively, you could say he just didn't care that much about either (painting or sculpture). If he really cared, he would have commmitted to it and not just done it because that's where the money was.
That's obviously dumb though. Business owners aren't forced to be in the business of attracting intelligent, engaged readers to great, engrossing content. They could be operating a porn video feed.
The truth is this: great content doesn't write itself, and web contents are perfectly within their bounds to try to monetize the experience or convert their visitors to a bit more.
Is there a way to do it in a more subtle, less distracting fashion? There might be.
Let's work on it. I don't mind the overlay on the economist web site's articles, at the moment, for example - do you? Is it still too much?
How do we allow customers to know that the content they are engaging wtih for minutes at a time is worth something to write, and requires a level of relationship, while still letting them read them quickly and effortlessly?
A subtle hint about this that would let people realize what is going on, while allowing them to engage without distraction, would be good for everyone.
While each of your objections are a matter of personal preferences and there can be discussion around them, you are certainly not entitled to label asking for sign-ups as 'dishonesty'. Using unnecessarily strong words without knowing the entire context (did you read the entire post or have seen the nature of our content or where we are trying to "milk" you?) is uncalled for. We don't track user with cookies, don't block our content (the overlay is dismissible), aren't showing any advertisements. Dishonesty is when I claim that I will not share your personal information with third party and still do so. How a sales process should be driven is a function of both being ethical as well as being cognizant of human behavior / market paradigms / reality. Both have to co-exist. And just to tell you what the actual behavior of our target segment is, they don't see everything in such stark light of suspicion (and neither do we misuse that) and thinking themselves to be the sheep. You can definitely judge us, but you could be doing that with lesser bias and pre-suppositions.
They obviously want signups at all costs, but I can't see where they monetize these signups that makes it worth degrading the user experience. Signup numbers for VC investment, then eventual advertising?
That, plus sign-up is usually the top of a funnel to ask you for money later on.
So they want to have as many signup as possible, and they also want as many conversion from free users to pay users or whatever. The reasoning is that if they double the number of signup, they'll double everything down the line (forgetting that the "quality" of signups matters and making a user create a phony account just to access one page one time is useless).
Probably. New users is a primary "growth" metric, and as we all know, startups have to grow fast to get VCs to invest.
Anecdotal data of course but If I'm still reading and something pops up over the content I either switch to iReader view (If it's good content) or close the tab faster than I can read the first sentence.
If I've not even had the chance to read anything when it pops up chances are anything on your domain is never being clicked again. If I came in via Google I click the little "Block <domain>" link on the way back for good measure
It's all fair though, because most content online has as much attention put into writing it as you are willing to put into accessing it. Your attitude is no different from an online "writer's": if it doesn't fall into their lap ready to be reposted with 1 single click, fuck it.
Seriously, I cannot fathom what content online is worth reading, but for which the 5 seconds you are cost to click an x is not worth investing. The level of entitlement you show here is bewildering. It is like you are fighting tooth and nail for junk content that is not worth anyone's time to any extent whatsoever. What a reader.
I, too, am annoyed by having to click an X. At the same time, it makes me smile: the content underneath is actually worth something, and took work on someone's part, to the extent that it's being monetized while remaining accessible for me. It's not going to be some two-sentence blogspam.
You make a fair point about the entitlement there. Free content does indeed have to pay off somewhere else it wont be free much longer. I just wish it didn't interrupt the reading flow!
There was a suggestion elsewhere in the thread of triggering the popover based on actions rather than time which might work better (Again, only on me that I know of - others will differ!)
For an example off the top of my head maybe the top of the bottom third of the currently visible window going past the start of the comment section[1] triggers it, at that point I'm probably done reading the article and about to leave or read some comments. There's a huge amount of variables here but if it was a good article and the popover is a mailing list signup chances are I'd be open to signing up at that point. From there you sell via email later on.
Unfortunately I don't have any real marketing data (or skills for that matter) to back me up which means there's a lot of "I" going on in my posts here, which definitely adds to the over-entitled jerk appearance. Chances are a lot of people will sign up and will click ads and websites would do a lot better with them as the reader than myself :-)
[1] Wow that was a horrible mash of words on reflection. Hopefully it's readable.
Thanks - sorry, I didn't mean to write quite so harshly and would probably tone it down a tad if I could still edit; I meant to just put an opposing viewpoint down, since you wrote with an exceptionally strong position. The truth is probably somewhere in between our two comments.
> Seriously, I cannot fathom what content online is worth reading, but for which the 5 seconds you save by clicking an x is not worth investing.
It's not about content, it's about the company actively showing that they don't really care about providing any value, but only about monetizing you.
This. I wrote this piece [1] on Medium, previously submitted here [2] about this exact issue. I also made Tab Closed; Didn't Read [3].
[1] https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/a30bbe8b54a5
Thanks for the links. Bookmarked TC;DR immediately.
That's complete bs, The only way that most of these content providers can keep on providing value for you is to monetize you. Web site's aren't free, writers/programmers/servers cost real money. No one owes you anything. You want good free content to read then deal with the fucking overlays. The sense of entitlement kills me. It isn't a answer of just being "better" either. People of lazy and if you give them all the content without at least pushing them to sign up, a lot will not.
> The only way that most of these content providers can keep on providing value for you is to monetize you.
How about if they actually asked for money in a honest, up-front way, instead of treating users like a cattle to be milked? What the hell happened to the "exchanging value for money" business model?
> No one owes you anything. You want good free content to read then deal with the fucking overlays.
Me dealing (or not) with overlays is a completely orthogonal thing to the fact that people who employ those methods are at least disrespectful of their users, if not out-right dishonest.
"When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor"
How about Never. Let the user decide if they want to have a relationship with you. Getting less conversions with a boring "sign up" form ? The solution is not an overlay. Solution is to make your product better or relevant for that user. If you can show the relevance or benefit, user will sign up on their own. If the user did not sign up, it is either because they are not the right target OR you suck at explaining how your product can give them what they want/need
And not to be a jerk but instead of spending all that time "analyzing" the numbers with overlay, why not make your product better by talking to customers if you can.
Examples:
I started reading reddit the first day it showed up on paulgraham.com. I never made an account. (I stopped visiting reddit years ago. not worth using brain cells on that stuff anymore.)
I started reading HN the first day it showed up on reddit. I made an account as fast as my fingers could type out credentials.
People will do what they want. Twitter went from 100% open to hiding everything except timelines behind login blocks (you can't view followers/following without logging in). Facebook went from 80% open to 99% blocked. expert sexchange went from 90% closed to 100% irrelevant.
why not make your product better by talking to customers if you can.
Because the CEOs view website visitors as cattle who must be pounded into shape. Haven't there been some studies showing most people, when presented with a "Enter your email address to continue" modal, just fill out the form and click okay?
It's all about propping up your asshole vanity metrics. You aren't going to get any actual permission marketing cohesion out of blanket view-and-bounce visitors whose email you "stole."
"Haven't there been some studies showing most people, when presented with a "Enter your email address to continue" modal, just fill out the form and click okay?"
Perhaps. I do it too if I really want the content BUT like many of us, my email address is "wont@tellu.com". Heck, if they make me enter my first/last name (some even do that), then my first name = wont, last name = tellu. So the point is, most of those are garbage bogus data anyway. Why bother collecting ? Now if the study shows that the % of garbage data entered is much lower than correct, then we are on to something
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1303/.
> If you can show the relevance or benefit, user will sign up on their own.
This is naive and ignores the wide gap between what motivated people will do and what people definitely don't want to do.
> it is either because they are not the right target OR you suck at explaining how your product can give them what they want/need
Inertia is a powerful force. One of the core drivers for marketing activity is to lead people to action, not simply explain things.
Politicians explicitly ask for votes because the prodding helps. Electronics sales reps ask if you'd like to buy insurance for your device. Restaurant receipts ask for tips. Sites ask for email signups.
"If the user did not sign up, it is either because they are not the right target OR you suck at explaining how your product can give them what they want/need"
This is flat-out not true.
Aggressive signup often increases #s across the board from signup all the way to engagement and purchase. Were these people not the right target? The fact is that aggressive signup leads to increased signups which gives you more time to explain how your product can give users what they want/need (which is always hard to explain to all possible users on a single landing page), ignore it at your own peril.
If you show me an overlay like that, I hate you.
Yeah, no kidding. Animated garbage popping up as soon as I start scrolling, and a "Subscribe" popup before I can possibly have had a chance to evaluate whether or not I might like to be annoyed with emails about whatever it is the post is on about? Plonk!
The post is all about how to reduce that same feeling. Convert hate to love, if possible. ;)
The sentiment from me is that any registration pop-up converts good feelings (good feelings that might have turned into love organically) into repulsive hate faster than I can close the tab or window.
The way to win me over is purely with content. I read HN for years without getting an account. Guess what, I came back day after day because of the content. Eventually I wanted to participate more actively, so I intentionally and with absolutely no prompting, registered.
The post is basically a slap in the face for the users. It's a detailed analysis about how to extract maximum monetization value out of a cheap and annoying trick. Working hard to optimize the effectiveness of this "method" shows a staggering amount of disrespect to their userbase.
Why don't you start by not generating hate? An unimaginable, controversial suggestion, no doubt, but perhaps there's some slight value in it all the same.
Population bias? It sounds like you currently have a sizeable population of anonymous users that evidently have found value in the site because they keep coming back. They are easy to convert now, but may have written the site off had you shown them the overlay on their first visit. Once you exhaust that population, you may get fwer conversions than before and fewer people using the site. How are you distinguishing the anonymous users that leave in disgust and vow never to come back? Are you sure you want to alienate such users up-front? I strongly prefer StackExchange's approach to Quora's.
Why not show the overlay when the user performs an action rather than after a delay? For example, displaying it when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page content. Or half way through but display it in a way that doesn't interrupt reading (as a fly-out from the right hand side perhaps)?
The optimal time to display something like that is when the user is engaged, interested and open to receiving more content from the site - not "after an arbitrary period of time".
That is a good point. We tried that but were not convinced about whether we are able to capture's user intention only via scroll tracking since our pages have images and users tend to quickly scroll through to get a "feel" of the content.
The post details how to show overlay at a more effective time. Intent is to use time spent on page as a proxy for user engagement since scroller tracking was not so effective.
I think you have a fundamental bug in your model of the funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the people who hear about the site and arrive there no matter what the means. Those who sign up are the ones advancing to the next stage (your clip art only has one stage, which may reflect your misunderstanding). So putting up an immediate sign up doesn't cut the number of people who come in through the top (as the article says) instead it just makes the first stage of your funnel shorter.
Now the aim of each funnel stages is to discard as many unqualified buyers as possible as soon as possible to avoid wasting your (and their) time. But how soon is "possible"? You have to qualify them (give them some content in your case, and see if they engage) to see if you are a good match. If you push the sign up right up front yes, more people may advance to the next stage, but you have no idea as to the quality of the leads (%false positive and %false negative).
Consider the rediculous extrema: you could assign everyone a user id when they first arrive (basically: a cookie!) which would give you a 100% conversion rate. Or you could disallow any sign up at all: a 0% conversion rate. It's easy to see that these boundary cases are useless.
But how do you know that your new approach isn't equally as useless? All that mathematics is exciting but doesn't address the two core questions: how many of these sign ups became revenue generators and how much revenue was abandoned to people who wouldn't sign up?.
TL;DR: You've analysed how quickly you get out of the driveway without looking at how that relates to getting to your destination (say, if you're even turning in the right direction).
If there's no obvious "dismiss" button, I found you can sometimes right-click, select "Inspect Element" and when you think you've found the DIV, select the "Delete Node" option. (Firefox)
Requires some HTML knowledge to pull off, alas.
The point is to show the banner/overlay precisely at the point when the system detects you like it.
Too bad all the fancy math can't account for people who don't share or upvote the content because their reading was rudely interrupted.
They don't care. They are optimizing for maximum signups, presumably because signups = growth = VC money.
Yes, but conversion rate is only a part of that. If nobody shares your article, it doesn't matter how good your conversion rate is. Optimizing conversion rates while ignoring the viral coefficient is like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because that's where the light is best.
Well, I guess the "viral coefficient" is something inherently unpredictable, so it's probably hard to include it in calculations.
Yes, but that's my point. Using only what's easy to include in calculations biases the outcome to what improves (easily measurable) conversion rate and not what improves the (difficult to measure) viral coefficient. This would be fine if the viral coefficient were independent of the variables they are adjusting to improve conversion, but I'm saying that they're not.
That gif advertisement in the corner is really annoying. It's even blocking some of the text on my screen.
Please devote all this mathematical brilliance to measuring the folks like me who NEVER RETURN TO YOUR SITE because proposing a relationship on my first anonymous visit means you're creepy and I will never invite you back into my life. I suspect that's more difficult to measure.
So, was the overlay more effective at conversions than no overlay at all?
I think this is a great article about how to measure overlay timing effectiveness, but didn't convince me that overlays work at all in general.
Yes, the overlay became more effective. Saw 4-5x increase in sign up rate in some cohorts. It certainly gave a much higher sign-up rate than without any overlay. In fact, just trying a dismissable overhead banner was also not working as great as an overlay.
Ahh that's interesting. Was the overlay un-dismissible?
It was dismissible. The whole idea was not to take an approach where the content is locked down.
My proposal? Get rid of the signup form altogether. Make it so they can give you money and take what they want in return.