With the cost of paid ads climbing, getting people to a site is more expensive than ever. What a brand does once visitors arrive matters more than it used to.
The popup is the tool most brands reach for first. On Shopify, for example, it is the most-used third-party visitor engagement tool, running on 62% of stores.
But it is one of several. Brands also use the onsite feed, in-page embeds, web push, and more, and this report benchmarks four of them using data from sites on Wisepops in the first half of 2026.
The report at a glance
The popup is the backbone of onsite marketing, and it earns that spot. Nothing reaches more visitors. The brands getting the most from their traffic build on it, adding a feed, an embed, and push, each for a job the popup was never there to do.
The four channels we analyzed
These are the four channels this report benchmarks. Others exist, from live chat to chatbots, but these four cover the core of onsite engagement.
The popup interrupts to capture a moment, the onsite feed sits in the site header, the embed is built into the page, and web push reaches a visitor after they leave. The figure under each card is how many times the channel was shown across the sample.
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A channel's share of views rarely matches its share of revenue
The popup is the simple case: its share of views and its share of revenue are close, at 76.6% of impressions and 83.0% of attributed revenue. The other two channels are where they split.
The onsite feed earns far more revenue than its views would suggest, at 2.4% of impressions but 15.8% of revenue.
The embed is the opposite, at 20.5% of impressions for 1.2% of revenue. Brands often use embeds for announcements and content that is not meant to drive a sale, so the revenue share stays low even though the embed is seen a lot.
The feed earns more per impression; the popup reaches far more people
Attributed revenue per 1,000 impressions puts a small channel and a large one on the same footing. On that measure the onsite feed and the popup look nothing alike, because they do different jobs.
The feed sits in the site header, and the visitors who open it browse and convert more, so it earns $779 per 1,000 impressions. The popup reaches far more people and captures 210,634 emails in the sample, earning $128 per 1,000.
Neither figure makes one channel better than the other. They measure two different things: revenue per impression against reach and capture.
Brands run one onsite channel far more often than several
Across the sites in the sample, 83.7% ran a single onsite channel in the first half of 2026, almost always the popup. Around 12.7% ran two, and 3.5% ran three or more.
One reason so many stay on a single channel is that the popup does a lot on its own. The same channel can capture leads, recover carts with AI, show product recommendations, and post announcements, so one tool already covers a range of jobs.
Still, 16.3% run more than one. The onsite feed, which earns the most revenue per impression, runs on only 11% of sites, so there is clear room to grow beyond the first channel.
The feed, popup, and embed engage at different rates
Engagement rate is engagements divided by call-to-action impressions: of everyone shown a call to action, how many act on it. The three measured channels land far apart.
The onsite feed leads at 8.5%, the popup sits at 4.5%, and the embed trails at 0.4%. The feed's rate is high because its impressions come from visitors who open it themselves, so they are already paying attention.
Web push engaged higher still in the sample, near 12%, but on so little volume (3,973 call-to-action impressions across 35 sites) that we read it as indicative rather than settled.
The channels' strengths add up when they run together
Each channel earns on a different metric because it works at a different point in the visit. The popup has the broadest reach, the feed earns from the visitors who open it, the embed lives inside the page, and web push follows up after.
They complement each other rather than compete. Each works best when it is personalized to the visitor rather than shown to everyone, and because their timing does not overlap, running several together covers more of the visit than one alone.
The onsite feed is the clearest opening. It earns among the highest revenue per impression of any channel here, yet runs on only 11% of sites, so the gap between its return and its adoption is where a lot of the next gain sits.
The popup will always carry the reach, and it should. But the brands pulling ahead treat it as the start of the visit rather than the whole of it, adding a feed for the visitors who come back and a push for the ones who leave. Every channel you turn on is revenue the popup was never going to reach alone.
How we measured the data
Population. All onsite channel activity on Wisepops in the first half of 2026, aggregated and anonymized, with no individual site identifiable. Channel benchmarks and shares are computed from six representative sample days, one per calendar month, and the absolute counts here are the sum of those six days rather than full-period totals.
Channels. The four onsite engagement channels are the popup (a timed or triggered overlay), the onsite feed (a notification feed in the site header, open to every visitor), the embed (a native, always-visible in-page block), and web push (a browser notification that reaches a visitor after they leave). Popups run in several formats, including welcome and exit-intent offers, product recommendations, AI cart recovery, and AI popups, where the user builds the popup and an algorithm decides who sees it.
Metrics. Engagement rate is engagements divided by call-to-action impressions. Capture rate is emails captured divided by impressions. Revenue per 1,000 impressions is attributed revenue divided by impressions, scaled to a per-1,000 figure. Impression share and revenue share are a channel's slice of all onsite impressions and of all attributed revenue. Multi-channel adoption counts the distinct channels a site ran with impressions across the sample days.
Limits. Web push has very low in-sample volume, 35 sites and a few thousand impressions, so its rates are indicative rather than settled. The onsite feed's high revenue per impression comes from visitors who open it themselves, so read it as the value of an engaged view rather than of the format alone. Revenue is attributed onsite revenue and follows the standard Wisepops attribution.