Email Capture Ads: Turn an Ad Slot Into a Signup Form

Not every ad slot has to sell something to someone else. Some of your best slots can sell something to you: a subscriber.

WB Ad Manager treats an email signup form as an ad type. That means it goes wherever an ad goes, with the same placement, scheduling and targeting controls, and its signups land in a list you can export. It is part of the free plugin.

What an email capture ad is

You create it the same way as any ad, under WB Ad Manager > Add New Ad, and choose Email Capture as the type. The form shows an email field, and an optional name field. When a visitor submits it, the address is saved and they see your success message.

Because it is an ad, you decide where it appears. After the content, after a paragraph, in a sidebar widget, or in a popup are all common places. Show it only to visitors who are not logged in, only on certain categories, or only on mobile, using the same targeting you would give any ad. The placing your first ad zones guide covers the placements.

Build one, step by step

Setting up a form takes a few minutes. Here is the order that avoids rework.

1. Go to WB Ad Manager > Add New Ad and give the ad a name you will recognise in the list, such as “Weekly recipes signup, in-article”.
2. Choose Email Capture as the ad type.
3. Write the headline and the optional description. Say what the subscriber gets and how often, in the plainest words you can.
4. Decide on the name field. Leave it off unless you will actually use the name, because every extra field costs signups.
5. Set the colors, the privacy line and the dismiss duration (more on that below).
6. Tick the placement, and set the paragraph number if you chose the in-article placement.
7. Set the ad to Enabled, publish it, and look at it in a browser window where you are not logged in.

That last step matters because of targeting. If you limited the form to logged-out visitors, you will not see it while you are signed in as an editor. Open a private window to check it.

What you can set

The editor keeps it simple.

The colors matter more than they look. A signup form that matches your site reads as part of the page, and one that does not reads as an ad.

Choosing a slot for the form

The same placements that carry banners carry the form, and they behave differently for a signup box.

• After a paragraph. The form sits inside the article, after the paragraph number you set on the ad (2 by default). Ticking the repeat option inserts it again every few paragraphs, which is usually too much for a form.
• Before or after content. A form at the end of a post catches readers who finished the article, which is the warmest audience you have.
• Sidebar widget. Always visible on desktop, usually invisible on a phone, depending on your theme.
• Sticky or floating. A fixed box that stays on screen. You can place it bottom right, bottom left, or as a full-width bar at the top or the bottom.
• Popup. A modal that opens after a delay (5 seconds by default), after the visitor scrolls part of the way down (50 percent by default) or when the pointer moves out through the top of the window.

For a first test, use the end of the post. It interrupts nobody, and the numbers tell you whether the offer itself is any good before you try anything louder.

One technical note: if you assign the same form to two placements, it shows only once on any page, in whichever slot renders first.

What the visitor sees

The form submits in the background, so the page does not reload. If the address is invalid, a short error appears in the form. If the visitor tries many times in a short window, the plugin slows them down: it allows 10 submissions a minute from one address.

On success, one of two things happens. With no redirect URL set, the form is replaced by your success message, and the whole box disappears after about five seconds. With a redirect URL set, the visitor goes straight to that page instead.

Either way, the plugin then remembers the visitor with a cookie, and the form stays hidden for the length of the dismiss duration. That is deliberate: someone who has just subscribed should not keep being asked.

The close button in the corner does the same thing for people who do not want to subscribe. They close it, and the form stays away for the same number of days.

Where the addresses go

Open WB Ad Manager > Email Captures. Each row shows the email, the name if you asked for one, the ad it came from, an IP value and the date. The list is paginated.

Two buttons do the useful work.

• Export CSV downloads the list, ready to import into your email service.
• Delete, on each row, removes a single capture. That is the control to reach for when someone asks you to erase their data.

The IP column is anonymised by default, and the plugin’s privacy settings control that.

The plugin collects and lists addresses. It does not send newsletters. To get new signups into your email tool automatically, use the hook below, or import the CSV on a schedule.

Passing signups to your email tool

For a developer, each successful signup fires an action:

wbam_email_captured( $email, $name, $ad_id )

Hook it to send the address to Mailchimp, ConvertKit or any webhook. There are also filters for validating a submission and for changing the privacy text, if you need custom rules.

If you are not writing code, the CSV export is the simple route, and a weekly export and import is a workable routine for a small list.

Measuring it

An email capture ad counts impressions like any other ad, so you can see how often the form was shown. The Email Captures list shows which ad each address came from. Divide the signups by the impressions for one ad and you have its signup rate.

Run two forms with different headlines in the same slot and they will share it by priority, which is a quick way to test copy. How that sharing works is in AdSense and direct sponsors in the same slot, and the same rules apply to any ad type.

Things to check before you publish

A few behaviours catch people out, and every one of them is easy to handle once you know.

• The ad label applies to forms too. The plugin puts a label above or below every ad, and the default text is “Advertisement”. A newsletter form with that word above it looks odd. Change or clear the text under Settings if the label does not suit your own forms.
• The page cap counts the form. The Maximum Ads Per Page setting (10 by default) applies to every ad type, so a busy page with many ads can leave no room for the form.
• Duplicates are not filtered. If the same person subscribes twice, both rows are saved. Check how your email tool treats a repeated address when you import.
• Cached pages can go stale. The form carries a security token that expires. If your caching plugin keeps a page for longer than a day, a visitor may see a form that reports a failed security check. Set a cache lifetime shorter than that for pages that carry a form.
• No consent box. The form has a text line for privacy wording and nothing else. See the privacy note at the end.

If you only ever read one item on this list, read the cache one. It is the cause of most “the form stopped working” reports, and the fix is a setting in your caching plugin.

A worked example

These numbers are made up to show the arithmetic. Your own will differ.

Say a recipe blog puts a form after the third paragraph of its best posts. Over a month the form is shown 8,000 times and the list gains 96 addresses. That is a signup rate of 1.2 percent (96 divided by 8,000).

The owner then writes a second headline that names the benefit (“One easy dinner idea, every Thursday”) in place of the generic “Subscribe to our Newsletter”. Both forms go into the same slot at the same priority, so each is shown about half the time. After another month, the Email Captures list shows which ad each address came from. If the new headline brought in 70 addresses from 4,000 views and the old one 40 from 4,000, the rates are 1.75 percent and 1.0 percent. The gap is big enough to act on, so the owner disables the old form.

Small differences are not worth acting on. A form shown 300 times and a second shown 300 times can differ by a handful of signups purely by chance. Wait for a few thousand views each, and change one thing at a time. The post on rotating ads and picking the winner explains how to judge a gap.

A routine that keeps the list clean

A signup form is not set and forget. A short routine keeps the data useful and the list lawful.

1. Weekly: open the Email Captures list, export the CSV and import it into your email tool. The export holds every row each time, so import only what is new, or let your tool skip repeats.
2. Monthly: compare signups with impressions for each form and retire the weaker one.
3. When a visitor asks to be removed: delete their row in Email Captures, and remove them from your email tool as well. The two lists are separate, so removing one does not touch the other.
4. After a theme or plugin update: view the form once as a logged-out visitor and submit a test address, then delete the test row.

If you use the hook to forward each signup as it arrives, keep in mind that it fires when the form is submitted, before the row is saved. Your email tool may therefore receive an address even if saving the row fails, which is another reason to check both lists now and then.

To see how the other ad types in the free plugin work, browse the feature list. If you also sell space to sponsors, direct sponsor ads shows how a paid slot and a signup slot can live on the same site, and the WordPress ad manager plugin page gives the wider picture.

A note on privacy

The Privacy Text field is where you say what you will do with the address. It is a line of text, not a consent checkbox, so if you need explicit consent in your region, put that wording in the text and check your own legal requirements. We cannot give legal advice, and rules vary by country.

What the plugin gives you is the means to honor a deletion request, one row at a time.

For the full list of what is free and what is Pro, see the free versus Pro page. Email capture ads are on the free side.