Popup Domination Review
This review is a long time overdue. That is in part because of a couple of reasons. For one we’re busy, so it takes a while for the reviews to get prioritized and for two it’s because we honestly didn’t believe what we were seeing for awhile and really wanted to have a few months of solid statistics before writing about it publicly. Though #2 is much more of an excuse, LOL, because we still should have done this review a couple or three months ago.
Popup Domination is a software tool that allows you to integrate popups onto your site. You’ve probably seen it on our site here as we’ve been using it for several months now. As this site is a WordPress blog, we use the WordPress Pluggin version of Popup Domination. However, it also comes with software that allows you to integrate it onto a non-Wordpress site – any flat HTML or PHP or ASP site can use it.
Love ‘em or Hate ‘em – They Work
Now the fact is that popups spark a huge debate and most people fall into one of two camps. Either they love them or they hate them. After several months worth of using them I can tell you I can certainly understand the love them group, though we don’t really fit in either. As always Mike and I take a pragmatic approach to them. If they work, we’ll use them and keep evaluating. If they don’t work, we won’t. Well, as you can tell we’ve still got ours on the site and it’s been there since October on what started out as a two week test.
Give Popup Domination a test run today…
Those that hate popups will tell you that they distract the user and erode the user experience and drive people away from your site. That may be true for some, I suppose, but our numbers certainly don’t bear that out. There are some valid reasons, however, for not using popups and you need to make sure you evaluate them properly. For example, if you run Google Adwords on your site you likely will not want popups (though we have a work-around for that as well, ok, actually Popup Domination has a work-around for it).
A Look At The Numbers
So back in October we began using Popup Domination on our site. It started out as a two week test run and we were going to pull it if we didn’t see significant benefits. If it was only a minor benefit we had already made up our mind that the distraction was not worth it, but we wanted to test the results for ourselves (something we always recommend you do as well).
Now, their sales page claims up to a 429% boost in subscribers. Sure, there’s a ton of marketing hype and fluff out there these days, so we weren’t really buying into this either. But the numbers as well as some conversations with some other marketers, convinced us to at least test it out.
Check Out Popup Domination today…
Our numbers, while not 429%, are extremely good – a 300% improvement in subscribers to our list. I just went into our Aweber account again today and double checked all of the numbers and we still show the same thing. Now, what could a 300% improvement in your list do for you? The facts are we had it setup in about an hour and that is all of the time we’ve ever spent on it. Over the past few months we’ve spent far more than that just double checking all of the data to see if it remains consistent, and it has.
But What About Those Negative Aspects?
What we expected was a dip in average page views per visitor, a dip in time on site and an increase in the site bounce rate. If the popup was driving people away, those are the types of analytics you would observe. But none of that occurred. All three of those statistics are either as good today as they were then or better – and we watch them carefully.
Now, before you go and draw the wrong conclusion here, we’re not saying that the popup improved time on site or improved bounce rate. While we’ve had improvements there, it’s not from the popup, it’s from other site level improvements. With regard to these factors, the popup will either make no difference or it will have a negative impact (slight or significant – depends on your niche and users), but it’s not going to have a positive influence on these metrics.
Okay, Okay – But What About Popup Domination’s Features?
Sorry, we kind of went off on a rant here as this is supposed to be a review of this particular product and not just info about popups in general. We got excited just looking at those numbers again. The good thing about Popup Domination is that it does almost everything you need (almost, because there is one item we have on our wish list – we’ll get to that in a minute).
As we mentioned already, it comes with two versions – one a WordPress Plugin and the other a standalone program. All of our testing and usage has been on the WordPress version as we hardly have any sites that are not WordPress blogs. Because it is a plugin, all of the administration is taken care of inside of WordPress via an Admin plugin. It is accessed via the Settings menu as PopUp Domination.
After you click on that link, you’ll be taken to an admin page that allows you to control various settings. Here is a screen shot of the menu of options you have at your disposal.

As you can see there are items for – Look and feel, Mailing List HTML, Template Fields, List Points, Schedule, Preview, Promote PopUp Domination and Advanced. It seems like a lot, but actually this is very easy to do and doesn’t take but a few minutes to get configured. Really guys, this is simple stuff, so don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. You just walk through each of these menu items and in about 15 to 20 minutes you’re all set.
Look and Feel
Here you select the template first. There are several pre-loaded templates – some require images of your download product others do not. But don’t get bogged down on this. Do a simple one without an image first (we have had it that way on our sites for months now and it’s been very effective).

Next you choose the colors for the theme. You can select the button color as well as other color options for the theme as a whole. So you can pick a palette that combines well with the design of your site.
Mailing List HTML

This is super easy. Simply paste in the HTML provided to you by your auto-responder for your optin box. It will parse through it and grab the information it needs. We only use Aweber, so we can’t give you advice on others, but for Aweber integration it is brain-dead simple – copy and paste.
Template Fields
This is very simple as well. Simply fill in the blanks for the various sections of the popup – the title, header and other options. You’ll end up playing around with this via their preview feature a few times until you get it looking the way you want, but it’s very easy.

List Points
The list points are the features or benefits your download (if you’re using one – and you should) will provide your users. If you’re not using a download/giveaway, than these are simply the benefits of joining your list. Personally, we would highly suggest you do a freebie PDF giveaway. If you want to get, you need to give – that’s the law of marketing. If you want to get their email, we recommend you give them something of value first.

Schedule
This section is very powerful. Basically this is your popup control panel. Here you can control how and when your popup is displayed and where it is displayed as well. This is the nice little trick that may allow you to get around the popup issue of Google Adwords. You can simply turn off popups to the pages you are promoting via adwords and your homepage as well (because they will visit the homepage to make some checks). Now, no guarantees, but it’s a wise tactic if you want to try both.

There are all kinds of options here and the best thing we can tell you is that you need to test them within your niche and readers. There are settings to control how many seconds after the user arrives before the popup is displayed and choices of where to display the popup. For example, you can simply click “Everywhere” and it will be shown for every page on your site. Or you can select by category or even individual pages – there are endless options here.
Preview
Not much to talk about here. Simply click on the preview link and it will show you what your popup will look like so that you can make any changes or alterations as necessary. Like we said, the first time you set this up, you’re likely going to spend quite a bit of time tweaking it around and using this preview a lot.

Promote PopUp Domination
Some people may like this feature, but we don’t use it. Maybe that’s a bad thing and maybe we’re losing some affiliate sales because of it, but it is our feeling that putting an outgoing link on the popup is sort of a self-defeating act – so we don’t do it. However, if you want, you can check this option and promote the product yourself. It will simply add a text link at the bottom of the popup that will take visitors straight to a sales page if they click on it.

Advanced
The advanced section is likely not necessary to be used unless you’re doing some CSS level customizations or adding images and such. We haven’t ever had to mess with ours and tried to just keep things simple and that is our recommendation for you as well.

What We Don’t Like About Popup Domination
There’s not much to dislike about it and this is a short list, but actually it’s a pretty big item. We would really like to see the ability to create multiple popups and control which one is shown. This would allow for the use of targeted contextual popups.
So, for example, if you were on a blog post about article spinning or our review of The Best Spinner we could show you a popup that would offer a giveaway PDF about article spinning. But, if you were on a page about linkbuilding or perhaps our review of Build My Rank well then we could show you a popup with a linkbuilding giveaway attached. We know that this would improve the opt-in percentage significantly, but we’ve yet to find a popup program that does that (if you know of one, please let us know).
Fortunately we’ve been talking with James about this multiple popup configuration and he’s assured us it’s on the way in a new upcoming version that is currently in the works. We look forward to that and will make an announcement when it comes out. No timeframe has been specified, so I wouldn’t wait for it.
We have had one user that has complained about the size of the popup being too big for his display resolution, and I’m sure if one has raised the point a few others have experienced it as well, but no solution will ever be perfect. There are always certain scenarios that you can’t win and that’s just part of doing business – marketing to the masses, because you can’t make everyone happy.
Summary
Now, not every niche is going to be a good fit for this approach – for some popups will likely not work well. However, even so, you still might use it selectively on your site by just turning it on for certain pages. The thing is you will never know until you try and given the great potential results from our experience we recommend you give it a shot. It’s a one-time purchase and is very affordable so in today’s marketing world you really can’t afford not to at least test it out for 2 weeks and watch your numbers.
Pricing
Pricing for Popup Domination is a very affordable one-time purchase of $47. Now I’m not sure if this is temporary pricing, but according to the website this is discounted price for a limited time. It’s been a few months since we purchased it, but I’m pretty sure we paid $97 or $127, so this appears to be a steal right now at just $47. Your email list is where your profits are and any tool that can double or triple your list optin rate is certainly worth an earnest look.
Give Popup Domination a test run today… 60 Day Money Back Guarantee
We know that there are others that are cheaper, but they don’t begin to compare with Popup Domination in terms of features. Those features will save you time and money, not just once, but every time you use it.
Popup Domination Bonus Offer
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On May 23, 2011 Dave wrote:
There’s one question burning in my mind, do you think the big G will ever penalise organic sites for having a popup?
On May 23, 2011 James wrote:
I’ve seen this app before on other sites, and it seems to be really popular. I decided to buy it after reading your review. I was a bit surprised at their lack of details. For instance, I didn’t realize that the $77 was only for a one-site license. Right after purchase, I got an upsell offer for the unlimited site license; I felt pushed into dumping more investment into something I thought I already had with the initial purchase. After that, I got another upsell offer for a developer license, which I declined. Then, I got yet a third upsell to for a bunch of tutorials and whatnot. Finally, I got to the download page.
The install was another round of frustration. Why they couldn’t put all of the files together in one uploaded…it’s poor delivery. Their documentation — videos with some text at the bottom of each video — is lacking. The WP plugin install was fine, with the exception of having to put the lightbox9 into the themes folder. There’s no README file in any of their three downloads, btw, to just tell me this.
Installing the Stand Alone was the worst part. Their install video said the jist of installing the Stand Alone is similar to installing on WP. Yeah right! They didn’t say you had to go to your installx folder and put in the database info. Neither did they say that you had to create the database and user permissions before executing the install. All the error it gave was, “Unable to connect”. Finally got everything sorted out.
Now that I got that bologna out of the way, I can try and set up my first popup.
I rated Ease of Use a one star for their lack of documentation in setting up. I rated the Price a two star for not being upfront that the initial price is for a one-site license. Disclosure is not their thing. I have my guard up moving forward.
Let me give you a little tip. You can knock off $10 off the price by closing out of their sales page. It will give you a javascript popup with a redirect to buy at $10 less. Stumbling onto that made me feel a tad bit better for having to go through all of those troubles. If you don’t get the popup, try again and on different browsers, if you have to. It’s there.
On May 25, 2011 Suzy Weiss wrote:
Hey Mike & Troy,
Couldn’t resist commenting here, hope you don’t mind.
Mike & Troy, I’m actually hoping that you can help me with my Popup Domination problem.
I did buy Popup Domination a couple of month’s ago so I didn’t get the discount.
I’m not going to cry about that.
But I do have a beef with them and am NOT a SATISFIED customer.
Here is my issue:
I have a wordpress blog with a Thesis Theme in a dating niche.
Like you I value my visitors and want to build a positive relationship with them.
My problem is that my Popup Domination has ‘gone rogue’ (to quote Sarah Palin).
It literately has a mind of it’s own.
Here are my settings:
When the close button is clicked, how long should it be before the lightbox is shown again?
7 days (recommended 7 days)
*** This is THE PROBLEM ***
This pop up shows up EVERY TIME you visit my site.
I can’t get it to show only every 7 days. It shows everytime I visit my site.
(It’s kinda like the accelerator problem that Toyota had a few years ago… I can’t get it to stop)
I have a 20 second delay before the lightbox is shown
I’ve read and watch all the tutorials.
I’ve gone online to see if I could get the answer.
I’ve gone on to the user forum for information.
I’ve sent their ‘support’ desk and email over 5 days ago for help and there has been no reply.
Here is my dilemma:
I want what Popup Domination promises.
I see other people that I respect and trust using it successfully
(Ryan Lee, Yaro Satrak, James Schramko, Gideon Shalwick, Yanik Silver)
I can’t get it to work properly.
I can’t get ‘support desk’ to respond.
I’m frustrated but open to suggestions.
What would you do if you were me?
Please check out my site, maybe it’s obvious that I’m doing something wrong.
Thanks for listening to my rant (I got carried away)
Suzy Weiss
On September 9, 2011 Amber wrote:
I’ve been getting this configured for a client. A HUUUUGE drawback of this plugin is that the Mailing List HTML configuration does not allow for the inclusion of any JavaScript code (if you save JavaScript to it, it cleans it out) and neither does it support shortcodes; only pure HTML.
This makes it EXCEPTIONALLY difficult when dealing with awesome Mailing List/Newsletter plugins (such as the one from Tribulant)to get your popup to work correctly (“Simply Copy & Paste Code” my fanny). I have pretty much been told by their support that nothing can be done about it instead of pointing me in the right direction of their code that I might tweak to allow it to parse JS.
It comes down to either I hunt through their code to figure out how to get JS to parse or I find a different popup box. Frustrating. GRRR.