Interstitial Ads - what do you think?

[JohnPalmer]

What do you think about this type of ads? any suggestions ?

[JohnPalmer]

Hi..
We deviated from the main topic... I'm not talking about PayWall, I'm talking about the ADS after few pages with the text "Continue to site"..

[RyanPurkey]

Perfect. That was my hunch, but thanks for clearing that up.

[EGOL]

These were Google Consumer Surveys, that function similar to a paywall.  The visitor lands on the site and can see part of the article - a couple paragraphs.  The survey covers the rest of the article.  The visitor is asked to answer a survey (usually one question) and if the survey is answered access is granted to the visitor and the webmaster earns $ for each question answered.

If you go to the webpage below you can see a screenshot of The Daily Globe with the survey covering most of the article.

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/publishers

Matt Southern talks about revenue here...

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-offers-new-way-monetize-site-content-embedded-consumer-surveys/119723/

[RyanPurkey]

EGOL, Slightly off topic, but I'm curious: these were 3rd party surveys, ya? Not on site ones regarding your own site's usability, etc?

[RyanPurkey]

You have EGOL saying he's less likely to link to a site with these types of ads, as well as the greater bounce rate when running them, it's a small sample size when considering the internet as a whole, but I think that's a trend that holds true. That would be a tick in the "bad" column.

Ads themselves are supposed to be value neutral, but when over used can be a spam signal. So "neutral" to "bad" there.

I would look for different sources of ad revenue and qualify them heavily when making changes.

[EGOL]

If your bounce rate goes up, your rankings might go down.

If people stop recommending your site, your rankings are not going to rise like they otherwise would.

I dumped out buckets of money when I took the surveys off.  Buckets.

[JohnPalmer]

What about SEO? good? bad?

[RyanPurkey]

Agree with EGOL. They're also higher targets for being blocked based on how they're implemented or via adblocking software in general.

[EGOL]

In general, I like ads and make my living by publishing a website that displays them.

I don't like interstitial ads because they are an annoyance and they require effort to close.   I see them a lot on Slate and Forbes.  If I didn't like some of their authors I would avoid those sites because of their interstitial ads.   Forbes runs other ads that I really dislike and would not run them on my own website.

I have a section on one of my websites that links out to eight to ten news stories per day on other websites.  I often see an interesting story on a site where my visitors are going to be hit with an interstitial ad, and before I include that story in my news I look to see if there is superior coverage of the same story on a website that does not display interstitial ads.

Would I run interstitial ads on my website?  Probably not.  I ran Google Surveys for a while (which are really similar to interstitials) but got rid of them even though they were paying buckets of money.   My bounce rate became horrible after they were placed on the site.  So, I figured that they were short term income and a long term decline in the popularity of my website.