I’m surprised advertisers don’t have much of a problem with it. Because it just makes me fucking despise whatever website I was tricked into going to.
It would be like a sandwich shop hiring a guy to wear a sandwich costume and pass out flyers on their corner. Only, instead of just doing that, he forces you into the sandwich shop. Guaranteed I would be pissed and hate that place for life.
The advertisers are likely not measuring the right metrics so they may not even notice. Sketchy things like this would increase their clickthrough rate, but lots of those users would drop off at the start of the funnel and not progress past the landing page. Many advertisers don’t properly measure funnel metrics end-to-end - how many people click the ad, then how many of those people view an item, then how many of those add the item to their cart, then how many of those get to the checkout, then how many of those actually buy the item. Users drop off at each point in the funnel and it’s important to know where to measure how effective your ad is.
They actually care quite a lot. Google ranks you down if this occurs frequently through a metric called Cumulative Layout Shift. You can also be put into confirm click status if you do this egregiously, which basically means you have to click “yes” after clicking an ad before you go to the actual page. It has a huge negative effect on revenue.
The trend to make an ad link suddenly appear right where and when the user is likely to press.
I’m surprised advertisers don’t have much of a problem with it. Because it just makes me fucking despise whatever website I was tricked into going to.
It would be like a sandwich shop hiring a guy to wear a sandwich costume and pass out flyers on their corner. Only, instead of just doing that, he forces you into the sandwich shop. Guaranteed I would be pissed and hate that place for life.
The advertisers are likely not measuring the right metrics so they may not even notice. Sketchy things like this would increase their clickthrough rate, but lots of those users would drop off at the start of the funnel and not progress past the landing page. Many advertisers don’t properly measure funnel metrics end-to-end - how many people click the ad, then how many of those people view an item, then how many of those add the item to their cart, then how many of those get to the checkout, then how many of those actually buy the item. Users drop off at each point in the funnel and it’s important to know where to measure how effective your ad is.
They actually care quite a lot. Google ranks you down if this occurs frequently through a metric called Cumulative Layout Shift. You can also be put into confirm click status if you do this egregiously, which basically means you have to click “yes” after clicking an ad before you go to the actual page. It has a huge negative effect on revenue.
And shucks, looks like the little x moved right when tried to click it to dismiss the ad and now you’re on a shady website.