Pop-ups and remarketing

Pick two or three pages with real intent and decent traffic: your pricing page, your best blog post and the landing page of a lead magnet. Skip the homepage at first, because people there are still looking around. Check traffic in Google Analytics so you know where the volume is.

There are three common triggers:

• Exit intent: shows when the cursor moves toward the browser's top edge. Works on desktop only.
• Scroll depth: shows after the reader has gone about halfway down an article. The reader has shown interest.
• Time on page: shows after 30 to 45 seconds. Use sparingly, since it interrupts reading.

For articles, scroll depth is usually the gentlest. For pricing pages, exit intent fits, with an offer of a short call or a comparison sheet. Testing the exact timing is covered in Optimise pop-up timing and triggers.

A pop-up on a page about proposal templates should offer the proposal template pack, not a general newsletter. Ask for one field, usually the email address. If you need more, collect it in the next step. The thinking behind offers is in Lead magnets that work, and field choice is in Forms that convert.

These rules keep pop-ups from backfiring:

• Do not show a pop-up in the first few seconds.
• Once dismissed, do not show it again for at least a week.
• Never show it to existing subscribers or customers. Use a cookie or a CRM list to exclude them.
• Make the close button large and obvious.
• On mobile, use a small banner at the bottom, not a full-screen overlay. Google can treat intrusive full-screen pop-ups on mobile as a problem for search.

Tools such as Justuno handle triggers and exclusions, and many form and marketing tools have a basic pop-up builder. Watch a few sessions in Hotjar to see how real visitors react.

In the EU you need consent before remarketing cookies fire. Set up your cookie banner first and check that the ad pixels only load after a visitor accepts. Then build your audiences. Skipping this step creates legal risk and unreliable audiences.

Create these and nothing more at the start:

1. Visitors to your pricing page in the last 30 days who did not book.
2. Visitors to a lead magnet landing page who did not download.
3. Readers of your top three articles in the last 60 days.

Exclude people who have already converted. Each platform requires a minimum audience size before it will serve ads, so check the figure in your account.

On LinkedIn Ads, a lead gen form opens inside LinkedIn with the contact's profile details pre-filled, so fewer people drop out. Meta Ads offers a similar lead form inside Facebook and Instagram. Send the audience from the pricing page an offer for a short call. Send the lead magnet audience the same asset they did not download, with a new angle in the headline.

Sync the leads into your CRM, for example HubSpot, the same day. A lead from a form is worth little if it waits a week for a response.

Limit how often one person sees your ads, such as three to five times per week. After 30 days with no response, remove people from the audience. Measure cost per lead and, more importantly, the share of those leads who book a meeting.

• Putting a pop-up on every page for every visitor.
• Asking for five fields in a pop-up.
• Forgetting to exclude people who already signed up.
• Showing the same ad to the same person for months.
• Building remarketing before the consent banner works.

Your pop-up conversion rate lands in the low single digits on the pages you chose, and your bounce rate on those pages does not rise. Remarketing leads book meetings at a rate close to your other sources. Visitors do not complain about being chased.