Many of Optin Cat’s settings restrict how often your optin forms will appear. While these settings can make for a much more pleasant experience for your viewers, they can also be hard to test, if you don’t know how.
Before you begin:
This article is helpful for free and premium users. It does, however, reference some premium only features. Head here for details, or to purchase.
In this article, we will be talking about how Optin Cat uses cookies and other methods, to keep track of these settings, and how you can test them to make sure they are working as expected.
Testing with Display Frequency:
If not set to display on every page-view, your forms can be tricky to test. They will not show again, for a set amount of time, depending on whether you chose once per visit, day, month, or only once. This behavior uses cookies to track the last time a viewer saw this form. Optin Cat’s forms then check for these cookies before displaying.
Display Frequency cookies always look like this: "fca_eoi_frequency_[form id]"
These cookies are always form specific, using your forms post ID to keep track (which can be found in your URL when editing your form). The value inside the cookies is an Epoch time stamp showing the last time the viewer saw the form. You can use an online epoch converter, and edit this value to sometime in the past, if you want to make sure the form will appear again when it is supposed to. You can simply delete the cookie if you need to make it show again.
Testing with Success Cookies
Optin cat has another similar feature called the Success Cookie. This feature is designed so that users who have successfully subscribed using that form, will not be shown the same form again. This feature also uses cookies to track this.
Upon successful optin a cookie is added to the user’s browser. It works very similar to the display frequency cookie.
Success cookies look like this: "fca_eoi_success_[form id]"
The cookie is form specific, using the form ID in the cookies name to track which form it is for. It uses an epoch timestamp as the value, marking when the successful subscription occurred. That form will not show again, until the time you have set.
If you need to make the form appear again, just delete this cookie. If you want to make sure the time is working, get an epoch timestamp, for a day or month prior. Then change the cookies value to that, and see if your form appears after a refresh.
Testing Number of Pageviews
Something that also uses cookies to track its behavior is the Number of Pageviews; At Least; X rules. This cookie is running anytime Optin Cat is, to track the amount of page views.
It looks like this: "fca_eoi_pagecount"
And its value is simply the amount of pages your viewer has seen. If you have this rule set a little higher, you may find it easier to edit this value to the amount of pageviews needed, rather than clicking around your site. You can also delete the cookie, to reset the counter.
Some notes about cookie behavior:
- Cookies will hang out until they expire or are cleared by the user.
- All our cookies are set to expire in one year.
- Cookies are browser specific, if your customer visits your site on multiple devices, they may see your forms more.
- All our cookies are first party cookies your site generates. Meaning they will not be blocked by most cookie restrictions or ad blockers.
And that’s all you need to know about testing with Optin Cats various cookies.
If you still need assistance with this or anything else regarding our plugins please feel free to contact our support at fatcatapps.com/support/.