CTA Slots & Targeting

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://documentation.outpost.pub/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Slots define where a CTA appears; audiences define who sees it. This page covers the six slot types, audience targeting, tag-based variants, and site-wide exclusions. To browse, edit, and style the CTAs you assign here, see Library & Styling.

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Auto Display Slots

This is where you configure the placement and targeting for each CTA position on your site. There are six slot types, each accessible via tabs across the top of the page.

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In-Post

In-Post slots place CTAs directly within the body of your Ghost posts. There are three In-Post slots available, each independently configurable:

• In-Post Slot 1 — Defaults to the top of the post
• In-Post Slot 2 — Defaults to manual placement (after paragraph 6, with a minimum of 10 paragraphs required)
• In-Post Slot 3 — Defaults to the end of the post

Position settings for each slot: This lets you decide to show a CTA at the top of a post, after the 2nd header, at the end of the post, and decide whether to hide a CTA on a shorter post. You can see CTAs in Ghost’s preview mode. If a CTA falls awkwardly on a particular post, you can manually reposition it in that post. For manual placement, copy a snippet like <div class="outpost-pub-container" data-box-subscribe-slot-1></div> from the manual snippet field and paste it into a Ghost HTML card where you want the CTA to appear. If you find this happens more than once, you can save that HTML card as a snippet in your editor so you can easily add it in other posts.

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Post Popup

A popup that appears over a Ghost post. You can configure when it triggers - e.g. on page load, after X percent scroll or after a set period of time. Please note that currently scroll percentage includes the full page, including comments.

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Post Slide Up

A banner that slides up from the bottom of the screen while reading a post. Most sites use either a popup or a Slide Up on a post but not both (unless you have very long articles). Slide-ups support the same trigger options as Post Popups (immediate, scroll depth, or time delay).

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Homepage Popup

A popup that appears on your site’s homepage. This has the same configuration — choose between immediate display on page load, scroll depth trigger, or delay.

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Registration Wall and Metered Paywall

This slot meters how many full posts a reader can view before they’re prompted to get on the free list (registration wall) or upgrade to paid (metered paywall). It works alongside Ghost’s per-post access settings. This slot is disabled by default and supports two independent limits: The stats box shows real-time performance: how many times the wall and paywall have been shown, how many free signups resulted (with click-through rate), and how many paid upgrades resulted (with click-through rate). For how reads are counted (the rolling 30-day window, and the difference between unknown and free metering) and the full paywall behavior, see Paywalls.

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Gated Download

This is akin to a lead magnet. It lets you offer a PDF or ePub to a reader in the body of a Ghost post (regardless of whether that post is public, free, or paid), and only grant access if they meet the rules you set. So you can have a completely public post with a PDF download card offering, say, the best ways to tie your shoes, set to free readers only — and to download it, the reader either has to be a free or paid reader or sign up for your free list. The CTA setting here controls the popup that appears when a reader needs to subscribe or upgrade to access a Gated Download. This slot is disabled by default and has two audiences:

• Unknown Audience — Shows a subscribe popup to non-logged-in visitors
• Free Audience — Shows an upgrade popup to free members trying to access a paid-only PDF

The stats box shows signup and download metrics for all Gated Downloads. The look of each Gated Download card in a post is controlled separately, on the Gated PDFs page.

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Audience targeting

Each slot can show a different CTA to different audience segments. Every slot has audience rows, each with:

• Toggle — Enable or disable this audience
• Audience type — Who this CTA targets
• CTA dropdown — Which CTA to show this audience (select from the Library)
• Edit button — Jump to edit the selected CTA
• Preview button — Preview what the reader will see

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Audience types

The Registration/Metered Wall and Gated Download slots only show audience rows for Unknown and Free — paid members aren’t a target audience for those walls. It is not currently possible to target a CTA based on a paid user tier or by labels.

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Tag-based variants

Tag-based variants let you show different CTAs depending on a post’s Ghost tags. For example, you could show a CTA touting your weather newsletter on posts tagged Weather and a different CTA on posts tagged Basketball or Baseball. To create one, click New audience, then follow the prompts to choose the audience and tag(s) and select the CTA. If multiple variants target the same tag, they apply in the order they appear in the interface.

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Site-Wide Exclusions

This allows you to prevent any Auto Display CTAs from appearing on specific content, which you might want to do for things like FOIA content or member announcements. Some sites apply this to URL refs that show up when someone clicks the “read on the web” link in a newsletter, assuming those readers are already members but might not be logged in. To do that, copy the ref for each newsletter you want to exclude. Note: if a newsletter reader shares that link on social, anyone who clicks it inherits the ref and also won’t see CTAs. These exclusions apply globally across all slots. Individual slots can also have their own tag exclusions in addition to these.

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