The Good, The Bad and The Pop Ups

Pop ups are marmite. You either find them bothersome, annoying and pointless or you see them as a useful conversion tool with the ability to take pressure away from customer service teams & consultants, offering website visitors extra information and guiding them to a certain action. 

So we’re all on the same page, a pop up is a window or a dialogue box that appears on the user's screen, often triggered by a specific action or page load. They can include newsletter subscription prompts, offers, notifications and chat support windows.

If you’re as old as I am, when thinking of pop ups you probably get flashbacks to the intrusive mess of the late 1990s and early 2000s where you could have a dozen pop ups all over the screen at any one time! Personally I’ve always found them annoying. From a business perspective I want to speak to my clients, whether that’s over the telephone or on email. From a user perspective, they pop up when I don’t need them. And when I want to speak to someone, I want to speak to a real person not an AI, data model driven tool. I want personalisation. 

Types of pop ups

1. Instant - they pop up as soon as the page loads and will normally follow you around the website, viewable on each page. They can cause users to instantly navigate from the website and may block content on the web page before the user has invested time to see if the page is relevant. 
2. Timed - they will pop up after a user has spent a set amount of time on a website, say 15-30 seconds. One advantage is that the user is now invested in the page content & website, however it can break their concentration from whatever they were reading. 
3. Scroll based - there will appear once the user has scrolled to a certain point on the page. Once users have started scrolling they are normally invested in the content or have decided the page may be relevant and are searching for the relevant section. 
4. Action based - these will appear when the user clicks on a button, link or some sort of interactivity with the page. 
5. Exit intent - when users look to navigate away from the page, a pop up will appear, maybe directing them to a more relevant page or encouraging them to sign up to a newsletter. 

Pop ups can be great for conversion rates (normally rates around 3%), traditionally outperforming other call to actions on your website. They encourage the user to interact with your website, ensuring the user is more engaged and possibly even offering useful information the user forgot to search for or hadn’t realised they needed. But at the same time around 73% of visitors have mentioned they do not have a positive opinion of them. 

So in which situations can you use a pop on your recruitment website? 

1. Register for job alerts - for example a candidate may trawl through your vacancy page but find nothing suitable. When they go to navigate away from the page you could trigger a pop up suggesting they register their email address for job alerts. 
2. Newsletter subscription - if your brand is strong when it comes to content you could place a pop up on the blogs pages, encouraging users to sign up for your weekly newsletter. 
3. Chatbot - like those offered by companies such as Hubspot. It’s normally a small line of code inserted in the root page of your website and it’s relatively easy to set up conversation flows for clients, candidates and prospective employees. 
4. Course adverts - does your recruitment company offer services outside of the traditional recruitment model. Do you offer CV writing services or interview preparation services? Well this could be a great opportunity to make users aware of these other services. 
5. Guides - maybe your business has compiled a salary survey recently. Maybe a pop up on the Clients page would be a great time to mention this piece of free content to potential clients. 
6. Surveys - on the flip side, why not ask candidates to enter their salary details and years of experience and use this data for your future salary surveys. 

What makes a great pop up?

1. Ensure it is easy for the user to dismiss the pop up. Make sure the dismiss button is easily seen and easily clickable. 
2. It needs to be relevant to clients, candidates or prospective employees. If a pop up is specific to one group then maybe use that on a page that is relevant to them, such as “Clients”, “Candidates”, “Internal Vacancies”, etc. 
3. Each pop up should have one objective and message. 
4. Timing - I’d avoid the instant pop ups and focus more on scrolling or exit a page pop ups. 
5. A/B testing - why not test to see how well your pop ups are performing and see if they’re negatively affecting bounce rate and user time on page stats. 

What makes an annoying pop up? 

1. If I’ve dismissed it once, don't make it appear again on the next page I navigate to. 
2. Keep pop ups limited to one at a time - we’ve moved on from the busy pages of the late 1990’s. 
3. Ensure they aren’t intrusive. Just because it looks fine on a desktop or tablet view, it may not translate well on mobile. 

In conclusion, pop ups can be great if used well, on the right parts of the website at the correct time and can see much higher conversion rates compared to other call to actions.