I very rarely click on any ads on Facebook. When I actually do click an ad it’s because the product I saw was very compelling and I’m likely to purchase it. I’ve been seeing a trend lately of sites that force your registration via a pop-up window as soon as you hit their sites. They are basically dropping an anchor from a speed boat and completely stopping me from going any further. They paid for my high-intent click and then wasted it by asking me to immediately create an account. That says to me they are a high-touch company that will constantly spam me and resell my email. Immediate broken trust.
Dotandbo.com is a perfect example of a frustrating conversion blocker. I clicked on a Facebook ad from Dot&Bo because they showed me a pic of a very cool chair. When I arrived at their site, my ONLY option to view their site was to either surrender to them my email account, or allow them access to my Facebook account. There was no “X” on the window to let me continue to the site. Also, I could tell that the content underneath was NOT the chair I was interested in. Two cardinal conversion sins – frustrate a user’s attempt to visit your site, and present them with content irrelevant to the ad that they clicked. They showed me a cool pic but in no way had built enough trust with me nor conveyed enough value to me to convince me to surrender my precious contact info.
I was annoyed so I asked a couple other people to check the site and see the “no X” problem. Guess what – they saw the X. I checked again thinking I’d missed it but nope, not there. I tried Chrome’s Incognito and sure enough – I got an X. I checked two other browsers where I had not clicked their ad and just like Chrome Incognito, got the X. I looked at their code and found that they are purposely NOT showing me the X because I arrived via an advertisement. You’ve got to be kidding me. They are purposefully breaking conversions on traffic they PAID to get!!
Dot&Bo missed out. I probably would have bought that chair. I probably would have told other people about them. I probably would have remembered their site in the future (just like I do Wayfair). They lost my trust and I’m surely not buying anything from them now.
