tl;dr: The world is better as there’s one Facebook fangate less. We tested a fangate on Theneeds for about 1 month on 9.5k visits, earning 79 likes at the price of 3.4k visitors bouncing.
Yes, we do hate fangates. Yet we've tested one at Theneeds and now we closed it. If you support this choice, like us on Facebook. ☺
What is a Fangate?
A fangate is an obnoxious popup window that appears in some websites before their content, usually when you come from Facebook, and asks you to "like" the website’s page.
If you place a fangate in your website, since it’s obnoxious, some people will bounce. Since it’s in front of great content, some people will click "like", and by doing that they will see more of your content in their Facebook stream and likely come back to visit your site! So, a fangate is a way to trade visitors with likes. Thus returning visitors — likely.
Is this trade worth it? We couldn’t find any data, yet many websites do have a fangate so we ended up testing ours. Why? To have data. And likes, but mostly we got data.
Theneeds Fangate in Numbers
We ran our test for about 1 month, targeting 9.5k visitors coming to Theneeds from Facebook. Out of these, 6.1k (64%) continued, 79 (1.3%) by liking Theneeds page on Facebook, the others by clicking on "I’ve already liked Theneeds on Facebook". Liars.
Read the other way around, in 1 month we got 79 extra likes trading 3.4k (36%) people that bounced and didn’t even read our content.
As a side effect, we also discovered that 98.7% of the population lies. ☺
What We Did Wrong
Inspired by Mashable, we designed our fangate with a big headline, a clear call to action, and a less visible dismiss button.
We targeted only the traffic from Facebook, to make sure people can actually like, and we recorded into a cookie if the user saw our fangate, to avoid showing it again and again — to make it less obnoxious.
Finally, we tracked events into Google analytics: opens, likes and closings (either after like or via the dismiss link).
In conclusion, we believe we didn’t do anything visibly wrong. The fangate is simply wrong. If you agree, like Theneeds on Facebook! ☺
