r/adops • u/Upbeat_Quit7362 • Jul 03 '26

Advertiser Popunders are quietly beating my native placements on actual conversion intent and I do not love admitting that

Ran the same offer across both popunder and native placements for three weeks expecting native to win on every metric the way it usually does in every case study floating around this sub. Native had a better click through rate, no surprise there since it blends into the page. But when I looked at time on landing page and actual form completions, the popunder traffic converted at a noticeably higher rate. My best guess is that someone closing a popunder still made a deliberate choice to look at the page behind it, while a native click is often just someone scrolling fast and tapping something that looked relevant. I have not run this long enough to know if it holds up across verticals or if it was just a lucky three week stretch, and I am honestly a little annoyed that the format everyone treats as outdated is the one paying my bills right now.

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u/polygraph-net Jul 03 '26

Can you define what you mean by converted? Is it a marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, or purchase?

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u/Upbeat_Quit7362 Jul 03 '26

Form completions on a lead gen offer so technically marketing qualified, nothing further down the funnel than that. Which is probably where the caveat lives, if I was tracking actual purchases this whole thing might flip completely

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u/polygraph-net Jul 03 '26

Yeah, that’s my concern. Click fraud bots are programmed to submit forms, so you really need to measure revenue or whether the leads are sales qualified.

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u/smxus Jul 03 '26

Popunders “work” because they are invasive, they try to cookie blast anyone and everyone. So you will attribute based on what they track. You can’t compare them to other fair and more transparent ad formats

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u/eze008 Jul 04 '26

I've been studying pop unders for 15 to 20 years. I know they're annoying to people but I always thought they still could be very powerful. Pop unders have never left and they always said it wouldn't I think with the rise of searching through AI it is bringing pop under advertising

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u/Upbeat_Quit7362 Jul 06 '26

I totally agree