Interstitial Ads: Do visitors loathe them as much as you think?

Short answer, no. At least for my site. For folks new to this biz, interstitials are those ads that fill the screen when you click a link on a site. Love 'em or hate 'em, they earn well. They only display after the first page visit. The old-school interstitials blocked access to the site before first page visit. Google came down on those so they aren't widely used. Mediavine and other top ad networks don't offer those old school varieties. Do visitors prefer no interstitials? Of course they prefer no interstitials. My list of preferences in life are a mile long but that doesn't mean I don't forego those things because they aren't perfect. However, my data suggests visitors don't care much I recently ran a week-long test where I stopped showing interstitial ads. The result: very small UX metric improvements. In other words, removing interstitials did not improve time-on-site or page views per session much at all. Which means it's full steam ahead with interstitials for me. They are back on pouring money into my pockets while I sleep. IMO, marketers dislike them more than our regular visitors. I don't mind them as a visitor. They don't bother me. The one ad that rubs me the wrong way is not being able to close the adhesion unit. That drives me nuts. Okay, I'm overstating it but it bothers me enough so that I set my sites so that visitors can close the adhesion ad. You must be careful who you listen to in this business... including me Not long after I started using display ads I was reading a thread on a forum where some self-righteous poster said they only put one AdSense unit on their site. Of course they went to say anyone who puts more than one ad on their site is doing a terrible thing... blah blah blah. I scoffed. Had I followed that advice, I'd earn pennies. So be very careful who you listen to. More importantly question/test everything for yourself. That includes with what I say. What's good for my site might not be good for your site and vice versa. If someone says "X is awful for UX" test it before blindly following it. It might be the case where removing interstitials significantly improves your time on site per visitor metric. It's easy to test. Turn off. Check Analytics. Here are the key numbers as a result of removing interstitials Site overall: - Page views per session went from 1.4 to 1.36 - Time on site went :47 to :44. That's a puny 3 second improvement. ​ Here are the page views per session changes for a handful of higher traffic posts: 2.38 to 2.47 2.31 to 2.36 1.87 to 1.79 (actually decreased... go figure) 2.24 to 2.39 2.69 to 2.08 (another decrease... bizarre) 2.56 to 2.44 2.08 to 2.38 2.35 to 2.56 2.35 to 2.15 2.26 to 2.31 2.12 to 2.97 (if all were this big, I'd keep interstitials off) 2.31 to 2.06 Kinda nuts how page views per session dropped for a handful of posts with interstitials. I should also say that the posts above are high-click posts designed to get the click and trigger interstitials. This means a high percentage of visitors see interstitials and yet most visitors continued to the second or third page. Interstitials earn me thousands per month. Interstitials make up 11% of my ad revenue. Check it out: ​ ​ It comes down to revenue vs UX The fact of the matter is no ad comes close to earning as much as interstitials per 1,000 impressions. Check it: ​ ​ Can you guess which figure is the interstitial revenue? It's the $60.79. That means my site earns $60.79 for every 1,000 interstitial ad impressions. It makes the other ad CPMs seem quaint Keep in mind not all visitors see an interstitials. Wish they did... imagine that. If pages per session and/or time on site improved 25%, I'd probably keep them off. That's not the case. I'm still not maximizing revenue despite my penchant for ad revenue I space content ads every 3 paras. I could reduce that to every two or one para. with Mediavine. It's tempting just to see how much I can crank revenue I also make it so visitors can close the adhesion ad. Again, I'm kinda tempted to turn that off to see just how much more it makes. As you can see from above, adhesion ad revenue is high. I might have to go nuclear with ads given a recent revenue challenge I recently joined. I do happen to care to some degree about UX. It's a balancing act. But I don't care about UX so much that I'll go down to one measly ad on my sites. That would be financial suicide. Jon Fatstacksblog.com Disclaimer: Nothing to disclaim. No affiliate links. No ads. Ironic, eh? An email all about maximizing revenue that earns nothing. See, I do care about UX. [Unsubscribe]( | [Update your profile]( | 2016 Hill Drive, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7H 2N5