I had always suspected that pop-unders would have a negative effect on the metrics of a website, but I struggled to find any hard evidence that backed this up. The vast majority of negative words about popups and pop-unders tended to be Nielson esque usability pieces or very subjective “I think” rants, and thus not great for building a convincing case against them.

Some months ago at one of my previous employers, I decided to run a test in agreement with the business, that aimed to truly understand the effect of pop-unders on site metrics, and in turn, the bottom line. With that agreement I teamed up with the resident web analyst and performed this little experiment.

The first thing we did was segment our user base into four groups:

• A – No popunder served
• B – 1 popunder every day
• C – 1 popunder every 3 days
• D – 1 popunder every 7 days

We then got the ad agency to generate the javascript code for each of the 3 pop-under serving frequencies.  Equipped with this code we then had to segment our users into 4 groups. We did this by targeting the last digit of an incremental six digit number that is our logged in users member ID, and then put them in a group that would be served the targeted advert code:

We then put the code live, and waited. We had planned to leave the code live for one month, but after about 8 days we thought we’d take a quick look at the results to see how they were progressing. At just over a week into the experiment it became apparent that we already had enough information to build a convincing argument against pop-unders.

The below table looks at customer behaviour and the associated revenue (I’ve twiddled the real figures, but kept the ratios) we got from our pop-under trial. It shows how much revenue was generated from logged in members based upon both pop-unders and ad space.

We can see that members who are served one pop-under per day repeat visit 0.6 times fewer than the control group and see 2 pages fewer per visit. Aggregating this out to a revenue figure (assumptions below), means that so far in the trial, those members who have seen one pop-under a day drive 40p per unique less in revenue than the control group. Therefore in order to make pop-unders viable for the business, they would need to pay circa £50CPM for a 1 a day serving frequency.

The group that was served 1 pop-under every 3 days also delivered slightly reduced revenue (-4p), but the 1 a week segment outperformed the control group. Had the trial not been canned after little over a week, it would have been interesting to see how these two groups would have performed over a longer period. I did try and encourage the business to see the experiment through, but suddenly they weren’t interested in pop-unders anymore…

Assumptions:-
£10CPM for pop-unders
5 ads per impression, 60% sell through, £8CPM ad space

Note: I’ve amended the CPM rates above to protect their true value, but have maintained the ratios between the figures.

• Twitter is the delayed search… ask your peer group a question, then wait. Personal recommendations are valued more than computer answers.
• Twitter is a recommendation engine.
• Invite your entire user base onto twitter and engage with them. Ask them what they want to see, how you can help them etc.
• NEVER spam to twitter
• Participate – help your followers out and be genuine.

Marketing / PR

• Brian Fetherstonhaugh on Multi-channel marketing – when each channel has the same design: “it’s like matching luggage syndrome and it’s failure number one… lazy integration… campaigns should play to the strengths of each medium.”
• Hot 5 marketing channels: Mobile, Social Media, LBS (location based service) & Local, Digital POS and Gaming.
• Search (SEO) is research, it’s an early form of discovery… “here’s what your consumer said”, “here’s what we know about our consumers”, “Search is the keeper of consumer intent”
• SEO Niches and the Big Picture
• You are no longer able to choose your brand spokesperson. Everyone is a spokesperson.
• Find the people who care about your brand, then give them the tools to speak about your brand.
• Only put out messages that people care about. Be interesting.
• Never “we are great / this is great because” more “we do this / this is how”
• Site failure / downtime is an opportunity “We’ll be back shortly, try this…”
• Free your data, but carry your logo.

PPC + Advertising

• Give MS Live a whirl as they have removed the minimum bid
• There is an Excel plugin for MS live keywords – “Advertising Intelligence Tool”
• Advertise on social media and news sites if you specifically want to target mobile users.

Should be thinking about now

• London 2012 – Get a page up for it now and get some content on it that is relevant to your niche. Page should have established position come the time when it is needed with a sneaky bit of link building.

Content + SEO + link building

• Don’t let SEO’s bastardise creative, well written copy. Let SEO’s support it with meta, title and supporting signposting.
• Focus on content, not the latest SEO craze.
• Make sure that you have a good geographic spread of links across the entire area that your business operates. Try to get full coverage.
• Consider buying a database e.g. maybe like this one – many to choose from here + other sites. Use this database and then invite businesses to supplement this information with their own content and encourage them to treat it as their own site. Sprinkle with some UGC and the number of new inbound links this will generate is huge. Also dish out badges or whatever to the businesses that do have their own sites for additional inbounds. If you get this site directory site to rank well, then it cannot be ignored by businesses.
• Total number of unique external domains linking to a url is the most important external linking metric. Always go for domain diversity.
• “Websites do not link to websites, people link to other peoples work”
• “Take what’s in the mind of people and mix it with your niche” – Swine flu etc.
• “Create discussion sparking content” – Invite authority figures to participate once the discussion has started.
• Buy directory links for stuff you need to rank on e.g. “baby”
• Shamelessly buy keyword links from digital point forums if you are a big enough brand. Don’t overdo it though.
• There has only being 1 penalty due to external links from a UK site, and it didn’t last very long. see here
• Great task for an placement student – build a promotion network.
• Tip off popular bloggers when you do something link worthy. Many of them have contact forms + twitter accounts that they are very responsive to.
• Do Bounty guest posts or articles on other blogs or magazines sites. Very powerful. E-zines… . Consider paying for this if the site is highly regarded enough. Sponsor well known writers to write an article on your behalf.
• Get Linkscape because it tells you external 301’s + the backlinks tool
• Use SEO Moz tools to see the reasons why other sites are ranking higher than you
• Don’t do footer links, particularly over optimised ones. A limited number of navigation ones are ok.
• Remove crap content.

Tech

• Do rel=”nofollow” on stuff you don’t want to rank for:
  • Login
  • My account
  • Personalised stuff
  • Basket
  • Terms of service / Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Legal notice
  • Accessibility
  • Disclaimer
  • Corporate site
• Dont use rel=”nofollow” on:
  • External links such as editorial external links. This is very important from building a promotional network and maintaining relationships with other sites.
  • About us page.
• CSS absolute positioning is risky behaviour. Shifting content by over 350px is more risky according to some spammer forum or other.
• Use meta=”noindex,follow” on page’s where you know you content is duplicated or on pages that you don’t want to be cached.
• FIX: “/blah/”, “/blah”, “/Blah” issues. Choose lowercase and always have closing slash.
• Choose one of http://blah and http://www.blah
• How to do 301 redirects in Apache .htaccess, IIS, PHP, ASP and ColdFusion
• Using Host Headers to host multiple websites on IIS 6.0
• Use rel=”canonical” for dupe pages e.g. blah.com/news/blah/ blah.com/news/blah/?sdfs=sdfsdf
• MAKE SURE 404 PAGES RETURN 404
• Use seomoz top pages with httpFox to check all OK.

Google Search:

• Use “filetype:” to find legacy pages
• Informational queries on the up
• Transactional searches reducing
• Check out Google Options

Analytics:

• Use compete.com for US
• Use Alexa 3 month reach for Global
• The real number of indexed pages by Google is: Go in your analytics package > filter referrer by Google > Do a count – that figure is the index.

People who knew their stuff:

• Patrick Altoft – Branded3
• Brian Fetherstonhaugh – OgilvyOne
• Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz
• Pete Wailes – Searchlight Digital
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen – deMib

Tools:

• SEO Browser
• Majestic SEO
• Link Diagnosis
• We build pages tools
• Seo Chat tools
• SEO Book tools
• Firefox plugins: Use HTTP Fox with Domain Details

There has been a lot of chat on the interweb recently about not supporting IE6, or at least offering a poorer experience for ease of development (which is what it essentially boils down to).  I don’t agree with this, I think if people want to use a rubbish browser, let them, but don’t lock them out! We can try and educate them into an upgrade, but we should never force them into it.

Anyway, back to my weekly technology report.  I thought it might be a good exercise to take our broad cross section of browser data and put it into some form of readable chart so that we can hopefully draw some conclusions as to when IE6 will no longer become an issue.  This is what the “women of the UK” web browser statage looks like:

Graph to show main browser usage.

Graph to show browser usage excluding IE7

If we then add a trend line to the IE6 line:

Graph to show browser usage with IE6 trendline

The trend line intersects point the x-axis at 04/08/2010.

We’re not that far away from washing our hands with IE6 – a little over 12 months if you follow the trend! I wouldn’t get too excited just yet though, I very much doubt it will entirely bottom out as there will still be the anti-upgrade brigade, and those that can’t because of real or perceived barriers. This will mean that progressive enhancement will remain just as important as it is now for the foreseable future. We must be careful as conscientious developers not to bov IE6 off and jack-off over our canvas elements just yet.

Further reading:
John Resig raises some good points in his post Determining Browser Market Share