In a test involving 60 people, found that nearly nine out of 10 click-throughs on one leading brand's pop-up ad were made by mistake because the close button was difficult to find. The average time taken for people to close the ads was 59 seconds.
Bunnyfoot has warned that the increasing use of "trickery", such as hiding the close button, is making consumers switch off from pop-overs and that brands are wasting money by paying for inaccurate click-throughs.
Rob Stevens, head of business behaviour at Bunnyfoot, said: "Achieving an over-inflated click-through rate might help brands to justify their spend, but they are only deceiving themselves. The brand, which we used in our research study, is not only wasting up to 90% of its budget by paying for unintentional click-throughs, it is also frustrating and deceiving users."
The research follows the publication of Bunnyfoot's white paper 'The efficacy of pop-ups and the resulting effect on brands', which showed that internet users had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to pop-up ads.
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