Gate High-Value Content with Form CTAs

Learn how to use your Form CTAs to "gate" premium content and replace your landing pages.

Before You Begin

• Gating is an optional feature that can be configured on Form CTAs. To learn more about Form CTAs and how to set them up, see this article.

About Gating with Form CTAs

As with Link CTAs, you can place your Form CTAs within your Streams or beside your Items. But Form CTAs also have one additional placement option that Link CTAs don't: Gate, which places the CTA in front of a content Item.

When you place a Form CTA like this, the Item is literally "gated" by the Form CTA: visitors will be able to see the Item in the background, but they can't access it until they "open the gate" by interacting with the Form CTA:

Since the content is right there, prospects are motivated to fill out the Form CTA and convert — in our research, we've found that gating content with Form CTAs returns a 17% conversion rate on average.

As a result, gating content is a highly effective way to deploy your Form CTAs, and helps you to better leverage your Hub's most valuable content to drive conversions.  Plus, Form CTAs can replace your traditional landing pages: not only does gating content with a Form CTA take a lot less time than building a landing page, it also performs 7x better on average.

Gate an Item with a Form CTA

Gating is a type of Form CTA placement, so you configure it in the same way as any other placement. To effectively gate an Item, you need to do the following:

• Disable any Stream level placements for the Form CTA
• Enable gated Item level placement(s)
• Choose the Item(s) to be gated

In this article, we'll assume you have already created the Form CTA you want to use. (If not, see this article for instructions.)

Standard Method

This is the typical method that is also common to the other types of CTA placements.

1. Navigate to the Form CTA which you want to use to gate content and click on it to open the Form CTA Editor.
2. In the Editor, click on the Placements tab.
3. If you have any existing placements, delete them. To do this, expand using the arrow on the right, then click on Delete:
   
4. Click on the +Add New Placement button. Use the dropdown to select the Stream where the Items you want to gate are located, then click on the +Add button to create the placement.
5. The new placement will be expanded automatically. Under the section At Stream Level, uncheck the box next to Will appear after Item:
   
6. Under the section At Item Level, click on the option Gate (block) to select it:
   
7. Additional options will now appear:
   
8. If you want to gate all Items in this Stream, leave the selection next to Items on All. If you want to gate only one or more specific Items in the Stream, click on Select, then click on the Find Items button that appears:
   
9. The Select Items to Block menu will appear as an overlay. Find the Item(s) you want to gate and click on each one to add them to the selection. Selected Items will be highlighted with a checkmark and the total number of Items in the selection is displayed in the lower right:
   
10. When you're ready, click on Done to confirm your selection and return to the Form CTA Editor, where the number of selected Items will also be reflected next to the Find Items button:
    
11. The Initial Delay option lets you set a time delay before the Form CTA appears on top of the Item. This allows the visitor to interact with the Item for anywhere from 5 to 90 seconds before being blocked by the CTA. In general, we recommend that you do not set a delay. If you want to enable this option, you can use the dropdown to select the desired delay duration:
    
12. Enabling the Allow dismissal option allows visitors to "open the gate" by simply closing the Form CTA rather than submitting their details. In most cases, we recommend that you leave this option disabled. If you want to turn it on, check the box next to it:
    
13. The Show Item body option is used for Items where the main content (such as an ebook or video) is accompanied by some additional body text. Enabling this option will gate only the main content behind the CTA, while the body text will be visible, like this:
    
    This is useful for giving visitors some context and information about the gated content, which can help entice them to access it (by submitting the Form CTA). In most cases, we recommend that you enable this option. To do so, check the box next to it:
    
14. Add any further placements as needed. Your changes will be saved automatically, and will become effective immediately.

Quick Method

You can also quickly place gates on individual Items as you browse through the Content section of Uberflip.

1. In the sidebar menu on the left, click on Content.
2. Under the Streams tab, click on the Stream that contains the Item you want to gate.
3. You will be taken to the Items tab for that Stream, where you will see the Tiles for the Items in the Stream. Find the Item you want to gate and click on the padlock icon in the top right corner of its Tile:
   
4. The Place CTA - Gate menu will appear in a new pop-up. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the pop-up to scroll through all of the available Form CTAs in your Hub:
   
5. You can also use the Search box at the top to narrow down the list. When you find the CTA you want to use, click on it to select it, then click on Place.
6. You'll be returned to the Items tab, where the padlock icon will now appear in green to show that the Item is gated:
   
7. You can also remove a gate from an Item in the same way: click on the padlock icon on a gated Item to open the Place CTA - Gate menu again, then click on the Remove button.
   
8. In the Place CTA - Gate menu, you can also click on the pencil icon in the top right. This will open the Form CTA Editor for the selected CTA, where you can configure it in more detail if needed: