Our first hint that Google was moving from banning app interstitials to all interstitials was in August 2015, when Gary Illyes confessed to the world that he would love to use them as a negative ranking factor one day. At the time, he said, “But we have nothing to announce at this time.” Advertising Continue reading below Now you already have a glimpse of Google's decision. To better understand what exactly is on the watch as January 10 rolls our way, we can take a look at the factors playing a role in the market. As frustrating as users find popups, companies continue to use them because they're effective. In a recent study of 1,754,957,675 popups, there was an average conversion rate of 3.09%, with high performing popups averaging 9.28%.
However, mobile traffic is increasing fax list and Google seems to be leaning hard on it. In 2015, Google reported that access via mobile was higher than desktop searches in ten countries. In the meantime, it should be noted that 56% of traffic on major sites comes from mobile. HubSpot's Senior Director of Product Marketing, Marcus Andrews, amicably reminded us recently that “Google is very user-focused.” He notes, "Marketers are always looking for malicious ways to increase traffic and conversion rates, and every now and then Google needs to make a fix to improve user experience." So it's no surprise that Google is focusing its resources on mobile rather than desktop. This is where the majority of users are - it's just good business.
Between this and its AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, it's fair to say that Google wants webmasters to provide a seamless user experience for mobile users. It is important to note that Google currently only looks at interstitials that appear . This means that the important part is to make sure that any traffic coming from Google is not delivered to these interstitials until the user has clicked further on the site. "What we're looking for are really interstitials that show up on the interaction between the search click and going to the page and viewing the content.