Ok, I know we have all seen them. You go to a website, look at the product, hit the back button and you get two windows that popup. The first window is an alert window telling you to stay on the page and the second window is a pop-up chat with automated text offering you a discounted offer.

I’m not saying that all pop-up chats are bad, just the ones that pop-up/appear when you’re attempting to leave the site.

Here’s a picture of one of these pop-up chats:

So why are these pop-up chats a bad thing? Don’t they save the sale?

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t recommend these chat windows, and just so you know…I’ve actually used them in the past so I’m speaking from both a user and a visitor’s experience (I don’t use them anymore).

1) They may save the sale for the merchant, but not for you. When I had this service they asked me how I wanted to give credit for the sale. They gave me three options:

1. They would remove the affiliate cookie so I would get full commission
2. They would replace the affiliate cookie with their own so they would get the sale (and I wouldn’t be required to pay for their service…they would be paid in saved sales commissions)
3. They would leave the cookie alone and would give the sale(s) to the affiliate that earned it.

So the first reason is, depending on the merchant you’re dealing with…you may or may not get credit for the sale. I know of several merchants who have used this software and had the affiliate cookie removed.

2) These popup windows are annoying. When you attempt to leave a website, it’s annoying to be prevented from doing so. It would be one thing if it just prompted you to stay, but it’s another thing to make you read their alert windows so you can actually leave their site.

3) They are strictly against Google and MSN’s terms of service. If you’re an affiliate an you promote a site that has these popup windows, then your advertisement is against their terms of service and it will be disabled as soon as they realize this. These popup chat windows break the following terms – No popup windows on site and the visitor must be able to easily get back to the original search page from the destination page in one click.
So, these are some of the reasons why I don’t recommend promoting websites that use these popup windows.

In case you’re wondering, I told them to give credit to the Affiliates and I also only had the popup window activate when people exited from the “Download” page this way the website wasn’t breaking any search engine terms since the popup wasn’t activated on the destination page.

Posted in Random Internet Marketing