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Article:
New Hover Ad Technology Instantly Increases Your Sales by: Satyajeet Hattangadi First Generation - The Popup Popups, if you're somehow, strangely, not familiar with the term, are those little windows that open when you visit certain sites. Popups are secondary browser windows that are opened up using JavaScript code. The properties of this new browser window are set in such a fashion that the new window does not have an address bar, status bar or the menu. Until about a few years ago, the popup was considered to be the biggest breakthrough in advertising on the web. When they were first introduced they were a great success and click-through rates went through the roof. Exit the banner ad - enter the popup. Web marketers could interrupt whatever a visitor was viewing, by launching a secondary window on top of the first to draw attention to their advertisement or opt-in list or any other item that they wished to get the attention to. After a while, like most good marketing tools, popups started getting abused. Popups would open secondary popups and eventually by just visiting page that has a single popup in it, you would end up with a barrage of say about 15-20 popups. This was exploited by unscrupulous marketers to the fullest, especially those hawking porn sites. Of course, webmasters who were in tune with the sentiment of visitors, soon began to use cookies to track if the popup was already shown and ensure it was not shown more than once per visitor. But, frustrated visitors soon began complaining about popups. Popups are your problem? - Get a popup blocker. Looking at the need of website visitors, software companies soon came up with popup blocking software. These applications read all the code that's going to the browser and if they find any JavaScript in the page code that's trying to open a window, BAM, it deletes that part of code. So Bye Bye popup! Generation Two - The PopUnder Not to be left behind, web marketers came up with another version, the popunder, which still launched a secondary window but placed it below the primary window. In most cases, the visitor didn't even notice this popunder until they closed the primary window. Of course this was less intrusive, but a pain nonetheless and you don't get an award for guessing what happened next. Yes you guessed right, the popup blockers soon started blocking popunders as well. Generation Next - Enter Hover Ads What the beejeezus are Hover Ads? They are floating ads that popup blockers can't stop. The technology that creates Hover Ads is not new. In fact, it's been available to web designers for at least 2 years now as DHTML (that's Dynamic HTML to those who don't know). These ads cannot be seen by older browsers like Internet Explorer 3.0. But since most netizens are using browsers (IE 4.0 and above) that are capable of displaying this code this type of advertising has started enjoying a rise in usage. Hover Ads are DHTML layers which can be selectively moved and displayed over the primary page that's being displayed. The basic code is still JavaScript, but since a new window is not being opened, the popup blockers can't figure out that an advertisement is being displayed. These layers can be animated, moved around, made to appear once per session, shown after a delay, etc. So that makes you ask 'Why should I switch from regular popups to Hover Ads?' The one and only compelling reason. Popups can be blocked! Hover Ads can't. So the bottom line is, if you use popups as a part of your online marketing strategy you're losing out on a lot of potential revenue, coz what they can't cant see they can't buy! Some statistics that make Hover Ads a compelling technology to use: The Alexa Toolbar can now block pop ups ('10
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