Google interstitial mobile ads dropped in response to user dislike

Night Shift touchscreen Apple ipad

Data showed that 70 percent of users didn’t like this style of advertising, so the tech giant has dropped them.

Interstitial advertising is exceptionally common among mobile ads, popping up over the content that a device user is viewing and encouraging them to take additional actions, such as to “get the app.”

The issue that mobile marketing firms have been experiencing is that users don’t like them.

Google has examined the results of a new study and determined that 7 out of every 10 users do not like the interstitial form of mobile ads. A recent post made by Google on its blog revealed that its Google+ team had felt that this form of advertising wasn’t bringing any benefit to the company when it came to providing an experience that users would like. The ads are frequently seen as invasive and very frequently occurring.

The study into these mobile ads was launched in order to prove or disprove the team’s suspicion.

touchscreen Apple ipad mobile adsWhat was found was that over 69 percent of users who visited the mobile site had completely left the page. This meant that they not only didn’t “get the app” at the app store, as instructed by the advertising, but the users didn’t even bother to continue on to the mobile site where they had been headed in the first place. There were only 9 percent of the visits that resulted in a click of the “get the app” button.

Google pointed out that there was a certain proportion of those users that clicked the button who already had the app, or who never bothered to follow through with the download once they reached the app store. While 9 percent does still represent a large number of users, when nearly 70 percent were outright put off by the advertising, it presented a risk that negated the benefit of the users who did actually download.

The risk was that the people who were put off by the interstitial mobile ads may not ever return to the site because they would conclude that it was not worth the time and inconvenience. Putting off 7 out of 10 visitors in order to potentially appeal to less than 1 out of 10 visitors was simply not seen as an appropriate pursuit.

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