When you want to check-up on something, you want to do it quick because your battery life is fading and you need that piece of information right there, right then and right away.
The moment you open that page which hosts the content you are interested in, a commercial pop-up screams in front of your eyes. You open the first one, a second one appears and so on until the battery completely drains and lets you cry in front of your mobile phone that is good for nothing now.
Well, those commercial pop-ups which constantly appear anywhere and anytime are interstitial apps, meaning web pages displayed before or after an expected content page. Most of the times they deliver advertisements, ask you to confirm your age or ask for your personal data in exchange of a monthly subscription. More often than not you are extremely annoyed by the unnecessary requests or ads that keep you away from finding the exact information you need.
Google has managed to observe that and in return has conducted a large study to conclude over the degree of inutility interstitial apps provide. Apart from the daily dose of annoyance, there is a question related to common sense, when it comes to apps continuously popping out on your computer screen. The main aim of mobile computing is to provide speed and convenience but it failed to do that once the interstitials appeared.
Google has just come from revealing the results of the study and unsurprisingly enough, 69% of visitors served with an interstitial for the Google+ social service abandoned the page entirely. They didn’t have the patience to download the app anymore or go on to visit the mobile website. This is entirely attributed to the added energy waste of serving mobile users with useless interstitials.
Interstitial apps give us a hard time and Google has managed to make that as official as it can be. However, Google managed to find that 9% of the visits to their social network’s interstitial page resulted in a click on “get the app” button. Google points out that those who pressed “Get the App” button would already have the app installed or might have never followed through to ultimately download it.
On the other hand, there is a high chance that many mobile users could have simply hit the call to action button in error, since those buttons tend to be uselessly large.
The research performed by Google is small scale, as the tech giant was willing to see how interstitial promotion for the Google+ service’s native app was performing. The exact numbers of the study are unknown. Speculation states that visitors could have wanted to generally stay away from the Google+ app specifically and Google is skewing the data, as they fail to offer comparative statistics with what could be the Gmail app interstitial.
Image Source: engadget.com
