Jean-Philippe Bedard wrote:
> I've just installed the Google toolbar, with the pop-up
> advertising blocker.
> It works great, 19 out of 20 pop-ups are blocked.
>
> Does anyone know what percentage of browsers have the Google
> and MSN toolbar
> installed? What source of information can we follow regularly?
I'm planning on doing a study in the next 6 months regarding this
primarily as the few popup campaigns we've been running are now
increasingly using more and more inventory to deliver and becoming
less and less attractive to sell.
At the beginning of this year I was delivering upwards of 25-30%
extra to get a campaign to finish, now a recent job required
45-50% additional inventory. This may have something to do with
MS bundling MSN Toolbar with their latest update to Messenger
(April 2004) which blocks popups by default.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Article130120.htm
This would certainly account for what I can only see as a marked
increase in descrpancy of code delivery vs successfully popped-up
window.
This, obviously, is not good enough and to be honest if you've
got that level of users 'actively' stopping such ad-units you've
really got to start considering the validity of the popup as
an ad-format.
Unfortunately Google doesn't publish regular stats on googlebar
usage, and I am currently unaware of anyway of dtetecting the
implementation via http headers (which would be a handy way
of targetting my adservers to not serve these ads). Perhaps we
could get the IAB to lobby popup blocker providers to insert
an identifier in the user-agent string when it's installed so that
we could not waste inventory on wasted ad calls.
Alternatively why not run your 200x200 (or larger) popup creative
as an MPU/in-editorial unit? Response rates are higher, the ad
looks better, it doesn't annoy the user as much and stays on the
screen longer.
I'm at Admonster Europe this weekend, it's an issue I intend raising
with other Ad/Tech Ops people and see how their dealing with this.
Sean Dillon
Ad Operations Manager
Hollinger Telegraph New Media
1 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London, E14 5DT
e: sean_at_telegraph.co.uk
t: +44-020-7531-3231
f: +44-020-7538-6158
w: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Received on Wed Jun 30 2004 - 11:52:48 CDT
