Avinash Kaushik, iPerceptions Offering 4Q: Exit Popup To Survey Visitors

Avinash Kaushik is one of the most knowledgeable people in the analytics space, but his newest venture 4Q with iPerceptions may have a problem. One of the pet peeves of Web users is that popups suck.

The idea of a survey to find out what people thought of your site is a good one, especially in a world where site owners are just starting to understand the need for analytics. The survey goes back to the old direct marketing system where restaurants and other brick and mortar services would poll their customers.

But while the information may be invaluable the bad taste exit popups leave in a visitor’s mouth is something iPerceptions may have wanted to survey first. The few people discussing the product on the site’s forum mention this problem and the drop in conversions the popup may be causing.

True, the message is not a pitch for a sale (well not directly), and many large companies still use the feature (log out of any travel booking site and you will see what I am talking about).

The feature itself can be written with a simple javascript and a landing page, so the outsourcing of it may be more for the novice. But it does give some aggregated information to 4Q and I have yet to read through the privacy policy to see how that may be used in the future.

There are a few features to this that make it a little different. You can actually set the percentage that see it – so you are not pushing it to everyone and could test it on say 10% of your exiting traffic.

I am on the fence right now but still remember how effective those exit popups used to be in grabbing email addresses when I used them a few years ago. One warning, don’t put them on any of your pages where you are using AdWords… it is against the T&Cs.