A Site That Opens With a Pop-Up

The site

An independent kitchen and housewares shop with a storefront on a busy street and an online store carrying about four hundred products.

On a phone, about a second after any page starts to load, a box slides up and covers the screen. It offers ten percent off a first order in exchange for an email address.

The box has a photograph, a headline, an email field and a large button. In the top corner, pressed against the edge of the screen, sits a pale grey X.

It appears on whichever page the visitor lands on, including product pages reached straight from a search.

The inference a visitor makes

Somebody who searched for a particular frying pan came to find out whether this shop has it, at what price, and whether they can pick it up today.

Before any of that, the shop has asked them for something. They have not seen a product or a price, and they are being asked to join a list.

The conclusion forms in the second it takes to look for the X: this shop wants something from me before it has shown me anything.

The offer adds a second thought. If anyone who signs up pays ten percent less, the price on the page is not really the price.

The first five seconds on a phone

• The page starts loading, and the product begins to appear.
• The box slides over it before the photograph has finished.
• The visitor looks for a way out, top right, then top left.
• The X is small and pale, tucked against the edge.
• Tapping outside the box does nothing at all.
• The back button is the one control that works.

The fifth is the one that was never tested. Tapping outside a box closes it on many sites, so people try it; here nothing happens, and the back button is easier to hit than the X.

Asking before showing

The pop-up is timed for the shop's convenience. It fires on arrival because that guarantees every visitor sees it.

But arrival is when a visitor knows least about the shop and has least reason to want its emails. Nobody joins the list of a shop they have not seen, except for the discount.

That shapes the list as well. An arrival pop-up collects a good many people who wanted the code once, and the newsletter then goes to addresses that never wanted a newsletter.

The close button nobody can hit

On a phone, the X is about the size of a grain of rice, pale grey on white, in the corner where the screen ends. On smaller phones the top of the box, X included, starts above the visible area.

There is no text link such as no thanks beneath the button, which is where a thumb would look. Every second spent hunting for a way out is a second not spent looking at a product.

What Google does with it on mobile

Since January 2017, Google has applied a rule: pages whose content is not easily accessible to someone arriving from mobile search may not rank as high.

Its examples match this site closely: a pop-up covering the main content as soon as the visitor arrives from the results, or a standalone box that must be dismissed before the page can be used.

It is one signal among many, and a highly relevant page can still rank. But a product page up against other shops has given away an advantage for a newsletter box.

The signal concerns pages reached from search. A prompt shown on a later page, once the visitor has chosen to look around, is not what it targets.

A worked example

The owner noticed it the ordinary way: on a phone, sending a customer a link to a pan, and spending the first seconds closing the box.

The pop-up was the newsletter add-on's default setting, never revisited after launch.

The shop switched the arrival trigger off. On phones, a slim bar now appears at the foot of the second page a visitor views, with the offer in one line and a close button sized for a thumb.

A sign-up block sits under the description on every product page, and the checkout has a box for the newsletter, unticked, since a pre-ticked box does not count as consent under Canada's anti-spam law.

The offer stayed the same. Only the moment of asking changed.

It comes back next week

The old pop-up had a quieter fault. Once closed, it was meant to stay away for thirty days, remembered by a small cookie its script set in the browser.

Since March, Safari on iPhones and Macs limits cookies created that way to seven days. Its Intelligent Tracking Prevention treats them as potential tracking, whatever their purpose.

So an iPhone customer who closed the box sees it again on any visit more than a week later. Regular customers, the people a shop most wants to keep comfortable, see it most often.

The limit applies only to cookies created by scripts, so whoever maintains the site can have the server remember the choice instead.

When a pop-up is fine

Pop-ups are not the problem. The timing and the size are.

A prompt that waits until a visitor has opened a second page, or read most of a product page, reaches people who have shown some interest.

A slim bar that closes with one obvious tap is one of Google's own examples of what the signal does not affect. So is a notice the law requires, such as an age check.

The counter-case within the site

An email list matters to a shop, and a prompt gets noticed where a footer form often does not.

On a laptop, where the box covers less and closes easily, a prompt shown as the visitor moves to leave costs little.

And for a shop whose visitors come mostly from its own newsletter, the search point weighs less, though the irritation does not.

So keep asking: after the visitor has seen something, in a space that leaves the page usable, and never on arrival from a search on a phone.

What to change

1. Open your site on a phone from a search result.
2. Turn off any pop-up that fires on arrival.
3. Show the offer on a second page view instead.
4. Use a slim bar on phones, not a full screen.
5. Make closing it one obvious tap.
6. Add an inline sign-up to product pages.
7. Offer an unticked box at checkout.

Step one is the one that settles the argument. Whoever chose the pop-up has usually seen it only on a laptop; ten seconds on a phone, arriving as customers do, shows what it costs.

The same problem in a different box is covered in a cookie banner nobody can close on a phone.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.