Users Hate Interstitials… Right?

March 4th, 2007 by Chris

I’m a big fan of interstitials. I see them as the ultimate answer in the ad/ad-blocker arms race.

Most of the detractors of the format say they are extremely annoying to users and that people will leave your site.

Well… I was just doing some datamining of my site statistics and I noticed a very very suprising trend.

I only run interstitials on heavy resource load pages, ie search pages. If a user searches I figure they’re pretty set on using my site and the search is the most resource intensive thing on the site so the interstitial revenue subsidizes that.

After viewing an interstitial a user continues to view, on average, 7.79 pages on my site. This is compared to an average page views per visitor of only around 4. Users who view an interstitial still end up viewing almost twice as many pages after that interstitial as the average user views in total. That is pretty strong evidence that interstitiates are not the visitor-repellent may people claim.

Interstitials still are not the perfect answer to ads. Few networks provide a separate ad code just for serving them, and those that do typically do not offer high rates as the format hasn’t seemed to catch on with advertisers, but this information certainly should be enough to convince most webmaster to atleast give them a try, even if only in one small area of your site.

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Posted in: Ad Networks »  by: Chris

4 Responses to “Users Hate Interstitials… Right?”

  1. Agua  Says:
    March 5th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

    How do your Interstitials perform compared to your other ads?

  2. Chris  Says:
    March 5th, 2007 at 9:17 pm

    Perform in what way?

    Revenue wise it is small because there aren’t a lot of interstitials to be had and I only run them on the search results. However, it is all additional revenue because it doesn’t take up any on-page real estate.

  3. Andrew Johnson  Says:
    March 6th, 2007 at 12:52 am

    There are two sides to this — ad buyer and publisher/seller. In terms of brand advertising, I think interstitials offer a great oppurtunity right now. Advertisers are complaining about their content being displayed along side of something “brand diluting” (adult content, foul language, etc.) Seems like the perfect choice for social networking sites.

  4. Agua  Says:
    March 6th, 2007 at 4:51 am

    Whats the CTR? Do they get clicks, or are the bypassed?

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