How Many Leads Are You Losing Due to Ad Blockers?

5/5 - (1 vote)
What percentage of your audience use ad blockers?
 
I never thought much about this until I started running an ad blocker to see what my visitors experience on my web site. I was shocked to see things like my Social Signup buttons (Sumo!) disappeared.
 
But I was also worried. I used Sumo click buttons to sign up visitors for my free trials and to join email newsletter.  Here’s what the Sumo popup looks like:

I had gotten an email query or two saying they didn’t work, but ignored them.  That was a mistake!
It was time to run an AB Test.
 
How well would linking to a signup form on a page vs the popup perform?
 
Turns out I got a romping stoming 36% boost in free trials linking to the page vs using the popup.
 
That’s a lot of popup blockers!
 
But, the journey wasn’t painless. The initial tests actually performed worse.
It’s surprisingly hard to recreate the nuances of a pop up with a page.
I started with a very clean signup page.  It was something like this:

No muss, no fuss, but it just didn’t convert as well as the popup.  It was off a whopping 70%!

Increase Trust

I was so sure ad blockers had to be taking a bite out of my leads that I just knew I had to keep testing.  So, I added what a call my “Trust Bar” to gain some Social Proof and other reassurance for the signup:

It helped, but not a lot.  Conversion was still below the popup.  I had one last trick to try.

My Audience Hates Being Locked In.  Does Yours?

I knew from prior experience that removing navigation often killed conversion.  I know we’ve seen it a million times where the experts recommend taking away navigation options at some point in the sign up process.

It just hasn’t worked well for me unless I have gotten a lot of micro-yes’s along the way and the participant is well and truly committed.

What does work is changing the navigation.  For example, once you agree to go look at a product, instead of getting the run of the site on the menus, you get menu choices that are all about that product:

  • Testimonials
  • Tours
  • etc..

So, I added the product menu bar to the sign up form:

And that’s the page that got me the 36% boost in conversion!

I suspect there’s more going on here.  For example, the original popup had no Trust Bar.  If I’d added those seals I’ll bet the popup would do better too.

But based on my testing, I still think the on-page version would win because people weren’t getting the popups and weren’t patient enough to pause their popup blockers and fool around with it.

By going this route, I eliminated that friction and confusion from their experience, and that’s always good to do.

I’ve got a lot more AB Tests to run.  It’s never done, in fact.  But I am very happy with the results of this one.

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