Explore Google+ Interstitial Ads with Application Ads

Posted by David Morell, Software Engineer, Google+
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Hello, Habr!

Surely you have encountered this situation: You go to some website from the phone, and instead of content, they immediately start offering you to download the official application. Many mobile sites encourage users to download applications in a similarly aggressive manner using interstitial ads.

Sometimes the application is more convenient to use and allows you to use functions that are not available when viewing the site in a browser. For example, it works more stable in the area of ​​insecure coverage of mobile networks, it can load data in the background. For this reason, many application owners believe that users should be encouraged to install an application that provides the functions of their site or service. It is not always obvious how active advertising of applications should be, since a full-screen interstitial ad can prevent the user from finding the right content.

Instead of guessing on the coffee grounds, we decided to simply measure a number of indicators and find out how effective this or that application advertising inside the mobile site.

For clarity, we decided to analyze how interstitial ads were used on the Google+ website for mobile devices. Internal research has shown that such ads cause a negative reaction from users. Our employee, Jennifer Gove, in her excellent talk at the 2014 Google I / O Conference, focused on this issue.


Since timestamps do not work on Habr, watch from 36 min. 30 sec

Although intuition suggests that interstitial ads should be abandoned, it’s more reliable to rely on statistics. Therefore, we decided to study the reaction of users to interstitial ads. Here is what our study revealed:

  • 9% of visitors to an interstitial ad clicked the Download Application button. At the same time, some of them already had the application installed, and some may not have downloaded it;
  • > 69% of visitors refused further action on the page. These users did not go either to the application store or back to the mobile version of the site.

For any campaign, 9% is an excellent CTR, but we were much more interested in those users who interrupted due to a hitch.

In July 2014, armed with the obtained data, we decided to conduct an experiment and see how visitors will behave if annoying interstitial ads are removed from the site. Instead, we placed a modest banner advertising the application, which offered users a more convenient way to receive content in a less intrusive manner. The results were unexpected:

  • The number of active users in one day (“ 1-day active ”) on the site increased by 17%;
  • The number of installations of the original Google+ application for iOS has not changed (-2% of the total). We don’t report the number of Google+ installations on Android devices, since in most cases this application was installed initially.

Based on the results, we decided to permanently abandon this type of advertising, and we recommend that you reconsider your attitude to interstitial ads. Now these offers are recorded in the form of advice in the Common errors section of the search engine optimization guide for mobile devices.

We believe that an increase in the number of active users confirms the relevance of this step, and you, guided by our experience, reconsider your attitude to interstitial advertising.

Let's not distract users from the main content and make the mobile Internet even more convenient and attractive!

PS: Since this study was conducted, a lot of water has flowed. We have already launchedAn improved version of Google+ for mobile , which does not even use an advertising banner for the application, if the user has a device with the latest version of the OS. For example, a banner will be seen by users of iOS 6 and iOS 5.

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