Looking at all the hate toward sing-up overlays one can wonder why websites still do this. The answer is simple, an unfortunately very sad.<p>Users value content. That's what they visit the webpage for. However, businesses like this (i.e. the ones inventing ideas like sign-up overlays) <i>do not care</i> about the content. They might say they do, but that is a lie. Website content is only a means to an end - extracting money from users. It's a bait for the fish.<p>This fundamental mismatch of values is - I think - the main reason why people still can't get why websites implement annoying sign-up pop-ups and stuff. Such companies don't really want to provide value to their users, they only pretend they want, to the extent that maximizes profit.<p>I'm fine with people earning money and charging for their work. But I believe that this relationship should be up-front. Running heavy maths to figure out the optimal amount of pretending-we-care to maximize profits is not only annoying, but dishonest.<p>I wish there was a way to reward businesses that actually focus on benefit to their customers, while punishing the ones who only pretend. Right now the only thing I can do, whenever I see annoying sign-up box or other signs of someone doing "clever things" to extract money from me, is to say "fuck you, I'm not coming back".<p>As for the usability part, [0] summed it up perfectly:<p>"(...) you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message."<p>[0] - <a href="http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/</a>
Anecdotal data of course but If I'm still reading and something pops up over the content I either switch to iReader view (If it's good content) or close the tab faster than I can read the first sentence.<p>If I've not even had the chance to read anything when it pops up chances are anything on your domain is never being clicked again. If I came in via Google I click the little "Block <domain>" link on the way back for good measure
"When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor"<p>How about Never. Let the user decide if they want to have a relationship with you. Getting less conversions with a boring "sign up" form ? The solution is not an overlay. Solution is to make your product better or relevant for <i>that</i> user. If you can show the relevance or benefit, user will sign up <i>on their own</i>. If the user did not sign up, it is either because they are not the right target OR you suck at explaining how your product can give them what they <i>want/need</i><p>And not to be a jerk but instead of spending all that time "analyzing" the numbers with overlay, why not make your product better by talking to customers if you can.
Population bias? It sounds like you currently have a sizeable population of anonymous users that evidently have found value in the site because they keep coming back. They are easy to convert now, but may have written the site off had you shown them the overlay on their first visit. Once you exhaust that population, you may get fwer conversions than before and fewer people using the site. How are you distinguishing the anonymous users that leave in disgust and vow never to come back? Are you sure you want to alienate such users up-front? I strongly prefer StackExchange's approach to Quora's.
Why not show the overlay when the user performs an action rather than after a delay? For example, displaying it when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page content. Or half way through but display it in a way that doesn't interrupt reading (as a fly-out from the right hand side perhaps)?<p>The optimal time to display something like that is when the user is engaged, interested and open to receiving more content from the site - not "after an arbitrary period of time".
I think you have a fundamental bug in your model of the funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the people who hear about the site and arrive there no matter what the means. Those who sign up are the ones advancing to the next stage (your clip art only has one stage, which may reflect your misunderstanding). So putting up an immediate sign up doesn't cut the number of people who come in through the top (as the article says) instead it just makes the first stage of your funnel shorter.<p>Now the aim of each funnel stages is to discard as many unqualified buyers as possible as soon as possible to avoid wasting your (and their) time. But how soon is "possible"? You have to qualify them (give them some content in your case, and see if they engage) to see if you are a good match. If you push the sign up right up front yes, more people may advance to the next stage, but you have no idea as to the quality of the leads (%false positive and %false negative).<p>Consider the rediculous extrema: you could assign everyone a user id when they first arrive (basically: a cookie!) which would give you a 100% conversion rate. Or you could disallow any sign up at all: a 0% conversion rate. It's easy to see that these boundary cases are useless.<p>But how do you know that your new approach isn't equally as useless? All that mathematics is exciting but doesn't address the two core questions: <i>how many of these sign ups became revenue generators</i> and <i>how much revenue was abandoned to people who wouldn't sign up?</i>.<p>TL;DR: You've analysed how quickly you get out of the driveway without looking at how that relates to getting to your destination (say, if you're even turning in the right direction).
If there's no obvious "dismiss" button, I found you can sometimes right-click, select "Inspect Element" and when you think you've found the DIV, select the "Delete Node" option. (Firefox)<p>Requires some HTML knowledge to pull off, alas.
Please devote all this mathematical brilliance to measuring the folks like me who NEVER RETURN TO YOUR SITE because proposing a relationship on my first anonymous visit means you're creepy and I will never invite you back into my life. I suspect that's more difficult to measure.
So, was the overlay more effective at conversions than no overlay at all?<p>I think this is a great article about how to measure overlay timing effectiveness, but didn't convince me that overlays work at all in general.