Research interstitial ads on Google+ with advertisements

Hi, Habr!

Surely you are faced with this situation: You go to any site from your phone, and instead of the content you are immediately offered to download the official application. Many sites for mobile devices encourage users to download applications in a similar aggressive manner using interstitial ads.

Sometimes the application is more convenient to use and allows you to use features that are not available when viewing the site in a browser. For example, it works more stable in the zone of uncertain coverage of mobile networks, can download data in the background. For this reason, many application owners believe that users need to be encouraged to install an application that provides the functions of their website or service. It is not always obvious how active advertising of applications should be, since a full-screen inter-page ad can prevent the user from finding the desired content.
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Instead of guessing at the coffee grounds, we decided to just 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 Google+ for mobile devices. Internal studies have shown that such ads cause negative feedback from users. Our employee Jennifer Gove (Jennifer Gove) in her remarkable report at the Google I / O 2014 conference focused on this issue.


^{Since timestamps are not working on Habré, look from 36 min. 30 seconds}

Although intuition suggests that interstitial ads should be abandoned, it is safer to rely on statistics. Therefore, we decided to study the reaction of users to interstitial ads. This is what our research revealed:

• 9% of inter-page ad visitors clicked the “Download Application” button. At the same time, some of them have already installed the application, and some, perhaps, have not downloaded it;
  
• > 69% of visitors refused further action on the page. These users did not go to the app 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 their work due to the arisen hitch.

In July 2014, armed with the data, we decided to conduct an experiment and see how visitors would behave if the annoying interstitial ads were removed from the site. Instead, we placed a modest banner advertising the application, which offered users a more convenient way to get content in a less obtrusive 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 do not report the number of Google+ installations on Android devices, since in most cases this application is installed initially.
  

Based on the results, we decided to permanently abandon this type of advertising, and we recommend that you also reconsider the attitude to inter-page ads. Now these suggestions are recorded as a tip in the Common Mistakes section of the mobile search engine optimization guide.

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

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

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