Exit-Intent Banner Timing Optimizer
Find the right moment to fire an exit popup without annoying visitors.
Fire timed popups around 62 seconds (or 55% scroll), and pair them with true exit-intent detection on desktop. Popping too early, before a visitor has read anything, trains people to dismiss on reflex and can hurt SEO on mobile.
On mobile there's no cursor to detect exit, so lean on timing and scroll depth. Avoid intrusive interstitials on entry, they risk a Google penalty and annoy everyone.
About this calculator
Fire an exit or timed popup too early and you interrupt someone who hasn't read enough to care yet, training them to dismiss it on reflex; fire it too late and the visitor has already left. This calculator uses your average session duration and pages-per-session to recommend a timing window that's late enough to have earned some attention but early enough to still catch the visitor before they go.
How to use it
- Enter average session duration in seconds and pages per session, both available in your analytics.
- Enter an engaged-visitor share, roughly how far into a typical session real intent forms before someone either converts or leaves (65% is a reasonable default).
- Read the recommended timed trigger point, the average time spent per page, and a scroll-depth fallback for cases where timing alone isn't enough signal.
Methodology
The timed trigger is average session duration × (engaged-visitor share ÷ 100), floored at a 15-second minimum so short average sessions never suggest an instant, jarring pop.
Average time per page is simply session duration ÷ pages per session, a secondary reference point for pacing content and popups relative to how visitors actually move through the site.
The scroll-depth fallback (55%) is a fixed recommendation, not derived from your inputs, since true cursor-based exit-intent detection doesn't exist on mobile; scroll depth and dwell time are the practical substitutes there.
FAQ
Exit-intent (detecting the cursor moving toward the browser chrome) only works on desktop with a mouse; there's no equivalent signal on touch devices. Mobile popups need a substitute trigger, either a timed delay or a scroll-depth threshold, which is what the fallback in this tool covers.
Yes, on two fronts: visitors who see a popup before they've engaged at all tend to dismiss it reflexively, poisoning future impressions of the offer, and Google has penalized intrusive interstitials on mobile search results specifically. Late, earned popups avoid both problems.
Not necessarily, high-intent pages (pricing, checkout) often warrant a different threshold than top-of-funnel content pages, since visitor intent and reading pace differ. Use this calculator's output as a sitewide baseline, then tune per template if you have page-level session data.