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Auto Display is Outpost’s system for automatically placing conversion widgets (CTAs) on your site. Instead of manually adding code to every Ghost post, you configure slots and audience targeting once, and Outpost handles the rest: showing the right CTA to the right reader at the right time. Auto Display CTAs are website-only. They do not show up in your Ghost newsletters unless someone clicks to read on the web.
Auto Display page showing the master toggle, the top section selector (Auto Display Slots, Library, Default Design, Site-Wide Exclusions), and slot type tabs (In-Post, Post Popup, Post Slide Up, Homepage Popup, Registration/Metered Wall, Gated Download)

The Auto Display page with the master toggle, slot tabs, and audience targeting

Auto Display is available on the Voyager and Luna plans. It is not available on the Space Station plan.
CTAs are sign-up nudges, not access control. They show on top of every post regardless of whether the post is public, registered-only, or paid. Whether a post is locked is set per-post in Ghost (and optionally enforced by Outpost’s Registration Wall). A CTA might prompt an unknown reader to sign up for the free newsletter on the same page where Ghost is gating the paid content behind a paywall. The two systems work together but do different jobs.

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How it works

  1. Slots define where a CTA appears: at the top of a post, as a popup, as a slide-up banner, on the homepage, or as a metered paywall
  2. Audiences define who sees it: unknown visitors, free members, monthly subscribers or annual subscribers
  3. CTAs define what they see: a subscribe box, an upgrade prompt, a discount offer, a donation button, or a prompt to give a gift subscription
  4. The Auto Display master toggle at the top of the page enables or disables the entire Auto Display system in one click

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The four sections

The Auto Display page has four sections, switched via the selector at the top of the page:

Slots & Targeting

The six slot types, audience targeting, tag-based variants, and site-wide exclusions

Library & Styling

Browse and enable CTA templates, edit their content, and style them with default design or custom CSS

Traffic Source Tracking

Attribute signups to campaigns and channels with UTM and referral labels

CTA Dashboard

View analytics across all your CTAs

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Conversion tracking

Outpost tracks performance for the Registration/Metered Wall and Gated Download slots with built-in stats:
  • Wall/paywall shows: How many times the CTA was displayed
  • Signups: Free member registrations triggered by the registration wall
  • Upgrades: Paid conversions triggered by the metered paywall
  • Click-through rate: Conversion percentage
For broader CTA analytics across all slot types, see the CTA Dashboard. To attribute signups to specific campaigns and channels, see Traffic Source Tracking.

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Name your CTAs

Most CTA editors have a Name field. A clear name makes a CTA easy to find later, in the Library, the Select CTA picker on an audience row, and the audience row’s CTA dropdown. Names are limited to 255 characters and are never shown to readers. They are optional everywhere except in Ad Campaigns, covered below. In the Auto Display editor, which you reach from the Library or an audience row, the Name field sits above the tab switcher. Ads opened from inside a campaign use a different editor, headed Create Ad or Edit Ad, where Name is a field in the Settings form. That is the one place a name is required: a Banner or Square ad in Ad Campaigns won’t save without one. Leave a CTA unnamed and the Select CTA picker and the audience row’s dropdown identify it by its type plus its creation date, for example “In-Post Box Modern - Subscribe, created 07/29/2026”. In the Library an unnamed CTA shows just its type name.

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CTA cloning

There are two ways to clone a CTA, and they behave differently. From an audience row. Open the CTA picker on an Auto Display Slots audience row and choose Clone this CTA, or pick a CTA type from the row’s dropdown when only one CTA of that type already exists. Either way, Outpost makes a copy, assigns it to that audience row, saves the slot, and opens the copy in the editor so you can customize it right away. Saving the slot activates the copy, so it starts serving to that audience as soon as it’s saved: there’s no separate activation step, and there’s no undo. From the legacy CSS banner. If a CTA is flagged for the older, unscoped Custom CSS, its editor shows a banner offering Clone this CTA and upgrade. This copy isn’t assigned to any slot or audience: the original keeps serving until you swap the copy in yourself. On both paths, the copy’s Custom CSS is copied and automatically re-scoped to it, and it keeps the original’s name unchanged, so rename the copy afterward to tell the two apart.

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A/B testing

There is no built-in randomized A/B testing. However, you can approximate A/B tests by creating two CTAs with different copy or designs in the Library, then assigning them to the same slot for different tag-based content. Compare conversion rates manually to determine which performs better. Confirm you have enough data before drawing conclusions.

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Frequently asked questions

The Auto Display master toggle enables or disables the entire Auto Display system in one click. It affects all Auto Display slots (In-Post, Popups, Slide Ups, Homepage Popups, Registration/Metered Wall, and Gated Downloads). It does not affect Manually Added Buttons that you’ve pasted into Ghost posts. Those are independent of Auto Display.
Check four things: (1) The Auto Display master toggle must be on. (2) The individual audience toggles within your slot must be enabled, and a CTA must be selected from the dropdown for each audience. (3) Make sure you aren’t logged in as a paid member (you won’t see the unknown or free CTAs). (4) Check the Theme Connection Wizard to confirm your theme is connected to Outpost.
No. You can use one, two, or all three. Each slot is independently configurable with its own position, audiences, and toggle. Disable the ones you don’t need.
Site-Wide Exclusions apply globally across every slot: if you add a tag there, no Auto Display CTA of any kind will appear on posts with that tag. Per-slot tag exclusions only affect that one specific slot. Both work together: a post can be excluded by either setting.
URL ref exclusions suppress CTAs for readers arriving via specific referral parameters. For example, if your newsletter links include ?ref=newsletter, adding “newsletter” to the exclusion list prevents subscribe popups from showing to readers who clicked through from email (since they’re likely already subscribed). Note that this ref is tied to the name of your newsletter, so don’t just add “newsletter”; check your newsletters’ refs.
CTAs must be both enabled in the Library and assigned to a slot. Editing a CTA doesn’t automatically assign it anywhere. Go to Auto Display Slots, pick the slot you want, and select that CTA from the dropdown for the relevant audience.
Yes. The Default Design tab lets you set global accent colors, button fonts, border radius, and text fonts that apply to all CTAs. If you want a specific CTA to look different, you can override the default on that individual CTA using the Design settings in the Library.
The agreement text is one setting for your whole site, not a field on each CTA. Open the Auto Display page’s Default Design tab and fill in the Agreement text card (see Library & Styling) to apply it everywhere; until you do, each CTA keeps showing the text it already had saved.

Gated PDFs

Offer downloadable files exclusively to subscribers

Paywalls

Meter content access and prompt upgrades

Manually Added Buttons

Generate embed code for buttons you place manually in posts

CTA Dashboard

View analytics across all your CTAs