Google Study Confirms All Of Our Suspicions About Online Ads

Ads that interrupt a person's browsing aren't just annoying -- it turns out they're basically worthless, too.

That's according to a recent Google study , which found that most people completely ignore so-called interstitial advertisements. A huge portion of people -- 69 percent in Google 's study -- chose to leave the website altogether when an ad interrupted them.

"Based on these results, we decided to permanently retire the interstitial," Google software engineer David Morell wrote in a blog post  Thursday. 

Google looked at a very specific, but common, type of advertisement in their study. These interstitial ads interrupted people who visited the Google+ social network on their smartphones and asked them to download the Google+ app. (You can see an example in the image above.) Many companies use this tactic to try to get people to download the brand's app when they visit a company's site on a phone or tablet.

In Google's study, 9 percent of people who experienced the interstitial ad actually clicked to "Get the app." While that's not a terrible number, it's outweighed by the far greater portion of people who said "forget this" and bounced from the page altogether. 

It's possible that Google+ is a unique case, but perhaps the study implies what most of us know in our gut to be true: Online advertisements that get in your face and interrupt whatever you're doing are truly the worst, in every way possible.