top of page

Campaign Pop Ups and Banners

BookTrust wanted a cost effective way of adding pop ups and banners to their website to showcase work, promote campaigns and advertise upcoming events... without upsetting the users.

Project Outline

Pop ups... most peoples toes curl at the thought of them. However, they do have their uses. Pop Ups and banners when used correctly, by carefully curating pages they appear on and how often they appear, can generate income, create interest and drum up support. When used badly they become a hugh pain point for users.

BookTrust initially needed a way of better getting their Christmas Campaign of 2023 in front of visitors to their website. Knowing that only 5% of users came via the home page meant that a pretty hero image on the home page wasn't going to cut it, they needed a different approach which was cost effective and useable beyond this campaign alone.

Initial Steps

The start of this project was kicked off when BookTrust realised that getting a bespoke popup built within their CMS (which was aged at the time) was going to be expensive and only a one off. This wasn't really a feasible option as the cost would have taken over 40% of what was raised with the final outcome.

So I was tasked with finding an alternative option to this, that was more cost effective, that we had more creative control over and wouldn't be 'just for Christmas'.

Research

My research for this project, in order to implement it, was more around what off the shelf systems are used for this. This was a pretty straightforward comparison task considering functionality and cost. In the end this resulted in the purchase of Unbounce due to it matching the needs of the organisation and the simplicity to the interface for users, as well as its straightforward pricing model.

However, there is another level of research that happens with every banner or pop up put in place. This research is based around optimisation for usage. The where and when of these elements. Each banner or pop up create needs to be placed so that it is in the right journeys on the website in order to reach its targeted audience, its frequency has to be assessed so as not to become a hinderance to the end user and probably most importantly is the consideration for the where and when it should not appear. This all changes for every campaign they are used for.

Design Process

The design process for this is fairly straight forward. I worked with the the departments requesting the use of a banner and/pop up to understand their needs as a first point. This then developed an outline of where and when the elements needs to appear as well as gaining what the CTA needs to be along with a physical UTM in order to manage tracking of the users.

I then worked with the creative team to match any design work that might have already been produced for the campaign already, this makes sure tone is matched.

Once the design is built in Unbounce and signed off, I then worked to identify where and when the elements should appear. Sometimes this was obvious, especially when it was related to a specific programme or campaign, it was likely just appear on related page. However, some organisation-wide campaigns (the Christmas one for example) was more about where it shouldn't appear as we didn't want it interfering with other important journeys on the site. The 'when' was a big consideration as it was about the timing and frequency of appearance of the elements, finding a balance between people seeing it, but not seeing it so much that they dismissed it and had negative feelings about it.

This then was all signed off and the elements were put live.

Whilst live, the campaigns would be reviewed constantly to make sure they were performing and tweaks would be made to the creative, as well as the where and when.

Post campaign there would a review of data to understand the success of the campaign and these elements help in that so that we could improve going forward.

Stoppers

The only stoppers within any of the banner and pop up work is the potential for discussion between departments, programmes and campaigns to make sure they are all getting the time and space they want. Or are at least working together to balance that out with some give and take. This is normally would be done with a simple conversation to reach an amicable solution, mainly when more than one person would like a campaign up at once (and this is possible to have multiple running at once in different locations).

Outcome

To date, this has been very success for BookTrust. The pop up and banners have managed to increase attendees at Webinars (versus years without this feature), driven traffic to resources and increased readership.

However, the clearest indicator of success for these is the charities Christmas Campaign, the thing is was originally sourced for.

In 2023, the combination of both elements led directly to 2,750 users clicking through to the donation portal and just over £29,000 being raised.

In 2024 this improved, with the combination of both elements led directly to 2,232 users clicking through to the donation portal, and despite that number being lower, a total of £37,520 was raised through this means alone. This attributed to around 16% of the total funds raised in the campaign.

Meaning that over 2 festive campaigns a total of £66,586.60 was raised from the implementation of the banners and pop ups.

bottom of page