Automated Split Testing

Guide to Choosing a Popup Plugin For Your Blog

March 6th, 2011

Love them or hate them- popups are proven to increase opt in rate for any lead generation campaign. Lightbox popups work especially well on blogs. We just completed a time intensive trial and error project where 4 different popups were tested on a popular marketing blog. Popups annoy many people but they are a highly effective tool for Lead Generation Campaigns. They work especially well on blogs and can be timed to show to readers after a specified period of time. Here is an honest review of 4 popups that were tried out on the popular Email Marketing Blog www.overcomeeverything.com

1) Action Popup ( Pro’s: Inexpensive and easy to use. Con’s: doesn’t recognize css styles)

Action Popup was created by Robert Plank. It cost us $47 and was well worth the investment. It does not conflict with our current Thesis theme or any of our existing installed plugins. We like to be able to specify our own pop up copy and this plugin easily allows for that. The only thing to keep in mind is it does NOT work with css styles. You’ll need to hard code all your fonts which isn’t all that difficult. Action Popup is another great product from software producer Robert Plank. At $47 it’s inexpensive and easy to install. We found it played nicely with our current theme (Thesis) and didn’t cause any errors with the installed plugins. Conflicts can be a problem with some popups. If your popup copy has css styles you will have to change those to hard coded html fonts. This isn’t hard but it can take a few minutes to accomplish. We liked this popup because it allowed us to input our own copy without being constrained by any templates imposed by the popup.

All the settings for Action Popup are on ONE page. There are not multiple tabs to click through. The settings interface has been very well thought out. You can customize when and how often the pop up shows to your visitors. In addition after a user opts into the pop up it never shows for them again. This is a feature that is very important, as you don’t want to continually to irritate visitors with the same popup over and over again after they have taken the very action requested! If you have the $47 to spend on improving your lead generation campaigns I recommend trying Action Popup.

2) MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup PRO (Pros’s: Paid and FREE versions. Con’s: Lacks important customization features)

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup PRO is easy to install and use. It just didn’t have all the settings we needed. However you can try it out for free and see how you like it. The main difference between the paid and free versions is with the paid version you have the ability to remove the “Powered by Max Blog Press” link that displays at the bottom of the popup. If you find this plugin fits your requirements it’s well worth the small investment to upgrade to the pro version and remove the “Powered By MaxBlogPress” branding. This plugin is good for first time popup users because you can try it before you buy it. We found it was easy to install as any other plugin. We did choose to upgrade to the paid version after trying it out for a week and that process was straightforward as well. We stopped using this popup because we were not able to split test our popup copy in real time. Since our recent trial it appears that MaxBlogPress has made improvements in usability and customization. It is definitely something to check out and try. Additionally you can specify the frequency that the popup displays to your visitors until they opt in.

3) PopUp Domination (Pro’s: Plug and play popup for $47. 60 day money back guarantee. Con’s: Look and feel limited by the templates.)

Popup Domination costs $47 and is great for the user that wants a templatized plugin to maximize their lead generation campaign. This popup is good if you like templates but can be difficult to use if you need to customize it to look the way you want. Customization of the templates themselves requires html and css coding knowledge. Although they are fine as-is. Some people many need certain tweaks made, and it is possible. The templates that come with the plugin look professional and readily accept any text you want to input. Depending on your copy you may find that the templates limit how many characters you can have per line. Good choice for the user who wants a professional look and feel out of the box. You can test out this plugin for 60 days and if you don’t like it you can get your money back. If you don’t like to design the look and feel of a page then this is the popup plugin for you. The templates look great and are pretty easy to plug text into. You will need to experiment with line breaks and formatting to get it looking right. The templates themselves are customizable but you’ll need coding skills to do that. If there is a certain style you want to implement hiring a technically inclined person to do the work shouldn’t be that difficult either. Our pages and copy didn’t fit well with the templates so we chose to go with a more flexible solution. However we received comment feedback from a reader who said he’d chosen PopUp Domination for his site and was very happy with it. At the end of the day this is one of the fastest plugins to install and have up and running for your new lead generation campaigns.

4) OptinPop (Pro’s: It’s FREE. Allows split testing of popup content. You can also upgrade to an advanced version for $67 Con’s: We haven’t found any yet. It’s what we’re currently using.)

This plugin is created by Brian Terry and Michel Komarov. It is free and fast to installl. The nice thing about OptinPop is you can specify an external url to display in the popup which shows through an iframe. This allows you to take a squeeze page you may be using with great success elsewhere and simply display it as a popup on your blog using the OptinPop plugin. If you don’t require a lot of custom settings then this may be just the popup for you. OptinPop Advanced (the upgraded version) is what we are currently using on the blog www.overcomeeverything.com. It is allowing us to split test our copy with ease. OptinPop Advanced allows the popup content to be displayed from an external page via an iframe. Then we started a Google Optimizer split test on the page which rotated out the two pieces of copy we wished to test. This quickly allowed us to see what was working and how to make it better. Also keep in mind that this popup is free. In our opinion it really can’t be beat. We started with the basic free version and soon after upgraded to the $67 package. It is well worth it.

There are pro’s and con’s to all of these popups, the one that works for us may not be a fit for your blog’s lead generation campaign. This depends on several things, such as blog theme, other plugins you are running etc. If you’ve never run a popup on your blog your audience reaction may not be positive either. Of course the only way to find out is to try!

Some of these popups are suitable for more advanced users who want to specify their own html. Others are designed to be as point and click as possible.

If you have never experimented with popups on your blog I’d recommend getting one of the free ones to start and seeing how you like the concept. You can always upgrade to a paid plugin if you experience a jump in your lead generation campaigns.

FRUSTRATION ELIMINATING BONUS!

If you have video embedded on your blog and you put a popup on there then this tip will be gold for you.

You’ll find that the pop up shows BEHIND your embedded videos. This looks terrible and basically renders the popup useless. With a couple simple lines of code you can fix the problem easily. Take a look at this post courtesy of Aweber.com. They do an amazing job of describing the problem and outlining the solution.