Darn Those Pop-Up Ads! They're Maddening, But Do They Work?

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They create as much clutter as those slippery advertising inserts that fatten a Sunday newspaper and are as inescapable as humidity in August. But just how annoying are those pop-up ads that appear unwanted on your computer screen as you cruise the Internet? How effective are they at selling stuff? And do they raise privacy issues in the same way that e-mail spam does?

E-commerce experts at Wharton and elsewhere say pop-ups are not universally loathed and irrevocably worthless. But collectively they can indeed be a nuisance. Pop-ups are a lot like other forms of advertising: If they are presented to a consumer at the wrong time and in the wrong way, they can be a big-time turn-off. But if a consumer sees them at the right time, they can provide useful information, or at least be entertaining and non-offensive.

Wharton marketing professor Patricia Williams, who teaches a course on electronic commerce, says there is not enough research to measure the effectiveness of pop-ups. "The only data I've seen shows that pop-up ads are way at the bottom of the list in terms of popularity [relative to other forms of advertising]. People prefer newspaper, magazine and television ads. People have a more positive attitude toward the least interruptive ads. The Internet is a place where consumers don't like to be interrupted." She adds that some research she has seen asserts that consumers think pop-ups are actually worse than telemarketing calls. This would be something of an achievement, since telemarketing calls have attained the distinction of being perhaps the most unwanted and intrusive sales attempts in marketing history.

But Williams says she does not necessarily believe those studies. "My intuition tells me that ads that have more a traditional advertising format are viewed differently than telemarketing or spam," she says. "One of the things marketers are concerned with is how persuasion works and how people judge the tactics used by persuaders and whether those tactics are appropriate. Invading my [e-mail] mailbox or my home with something I don't want is an inappropriate tactic in general." By contrast, "consumers feel that when they watch television, ads will appear. It's part of the consumer process. My intuition is that pop-up ads are more like television ads that we're used to."

"I find that pop-ups really polarize people," says David Schrader, director of strategy and marketing for the Applications Solutions Group at Teradata, a division of NCR Corp. that helps businesses collect and analyze data. "For people who have to get rid of them, they're just clutter. They start bordering on the equivalent of spam."

"Pop-up ads are probably the only form of advertising that has spawned a whole industry designed to help you get them off your screen," says David Croson, visiting professor of digital strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at MIT's Center for eBusiness. "I think pop-up ads have created a really strong negative response."

An Experiment in Effectiveness

Wendy Moe, who earned a Ph.D. at Wharton and now teaches at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, has conducted a field experiment testing the effectiveness of pop-up ads in certain circumstances. The results are outlined in a paper titled "Should We Wait to Promote?: The Effect of Timing on Response to Pop-Up Promotions."

Moe found that pop-up ads do not necessarily annoy web users; the level of annoyance depends on the situation. For the study, Moe offered pop-up ads to users of a fairly well-trafficked content site. For some, the ads were made to pop up very early in the session. For others, there was a delay before the pop-up was offered.

"The effects varied depending on what the user's purpose at the site was," Moe explains. "For users who sought out fairly in-depth information from the site, the added pop-up basically overloaded them with information, and as a result they exited the web site earlier than they probably would have otherwise. For those who were browsing at the site and were not seriously seeking out lots of information, the pop-up was a welcomed interruption to their browsing activities. Some pop-ups lengthened these users' stay at the site."

Moe adds that her study turned up other interesting results, consistent with her main findings, concerning the page on which the pop-up was offered. People who were merely browsing tended to respond more positively when the pop-up appeared at a time when they were viewing a 'content' page -- that is, a page with product-specific information -- compared to a 'gateway' page, which primarily contains links to content pages. By contrast, in-depth searchers were even more likely to be overloaded with information when these pop-ups were offered on content pages. Thus, their response was highly negative both in terms of click-throughs, which are a way to measure Internet traffic, as well as the number of times they decided to exit the site.

Pop-ups, which appear in windows that appear in the foreground of a computer screen and block parts of the main page that a person wants to view, are just one of a number of promotional formats found on the web. Other types, mentioned in Moe's paper, include "banners," which are similar to standard print ads; "pop-unders," which appear in windows that open in the background of the screen and only become visible when the user closes the main window; "bridge pages," which are pages to which a user is redirected when navigating from one page to another; and "in-page animations," which use pictures and sound like TV ads and, like a pop-up, block the page a person is trying to view.

Dan Hunter, a professor of legal studies at Wharton who conducts research on e-commerce, agrees that the degree of annoyance at pop-ups will differ depending on the temperament of the user and the circumstances. "Apart from the degree of tolerance of any individual user, I think that there are two aspects that affect degree of annoyance: speed of connection and whether the pop is up or under," he says.

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