OptiMonk builds two campaign formats: the popup (a card in the middle of the page, over a dimmed backdrop) and the fullscreen, which covers the entire screen.
Fullscreen messages are similar to popups, but — as their name implies — they cover the whole screen. That is what makes fullscreen unavoidable and one of the most effective ways of getting attention and increasing conversion. It is also a great fit for collecting subscribers, promoting an eBook, or pushing one special offer.
What makes them so effective is that they remove every distraction that could pull your visitor's attention away from your offer. With limited choices at hand, visitors are encouraged to move forward. From that angle a fullscreen works like a mini landing page — only much easier to create.
One thing to know up front: on a fullscreen the design is the background. There is no dimmed area around the popup, because there is no page showing behind it; the imagery, the gradient or the scene fills every edge, and the headline, the form and the button sit on top of it.
How to get a fullscreen
You don't pick a template and you don't pick a message type from a list — you say what you want.
Click New campaign in the sidebar (or start typing in the box on the home screen: Describe the popup you want — or pick an example below…).
Describe the campaign and say it should be fullscreen — for example: "Fullscreen welcome offer for example.com with 15% off for the email address."
Answer the few clarifying questions the designer asks, and it goes off to draw your concepts.
The word matters more than the sentence around it: fullscreen or full-bleed gets you a fullscreen, lightbox or modal gets you a card. The bare word "popup" is deliberately not a format signal — everything here is a popup — so "make me a popup" leaves the choice open. A later instruction wins over an earlier one, so you can change your mind mid-conversation just by saying so.
When OptiMonk isn't sure, it asks
If your brief leaves the format genuinely open, one extra question comes back before the drawing starts:
One more question: do you picture this as a lightbox popup (centered, over a dimmed backdrop) or as a fullscreen one (the background ITSELF is the design, filling the whole screen)?
with two buttons to answer it: Lightbox popup and Fullscreen.
And if you started from a fullscreen design you picked in the Library, it checks that you meant to keep the format:
This looks like a fullscreen design — should I keep it fullscreen (the design fills the whole page), or turn it into a normal popup for your brand?
answered with Keep it fullscreen or Normal popup (lightbox).
If you don't say anything
When you never mention a format, the designer chooses per concept: it defaults to the card popup, and may make at most one of the four concepts a fullscreen takeover — only where a full-bleed moment genuinely serves the idea (a rich photographic world, an immersive seasonal drop). A form-heavy or coupon-first concept stays a card. So you can simply look at the board and pick the fullscreen one if you like it.
From concept to campaign
On the concept board, pick the concept you want. Each card shows a plan (a Desktop plan and a Mobile plan), not a finished popup.
Walk through the steps that follow — targeting, coupon, review — and press Build it. Nothing is built before that: The build starts with Build it, at the end of the plan — nothing is being built yet.
OptiMonk builds the real HTML in both a desktop and a mobile version, then hands you the preview.
From there it is the same as any other campaign: refine it by writing in the chat, open the Drag & drop editor for hand edits, set targeting and frequency on the campaign's Settings, and publish.
Editing a fullscreen
The editor is the same one you use for card popups, with two differences that it tells you about on the spot:
No dim overlay. The Dim overlay section is replaced by: This popup fills the whole screen, so there is no visible area behind it — a dim overlay would never show, and it is not published for full-screen popups. Set the popup's own background on the canvas instead.
No outer layout. Alignment and spacing around the popup are meaningless here: This popup fills the whole screen, so the popup itself takes up the entire canvas — there is no free room around it to align or space it into. Set the layout of the elements INSIDE the popup instead.
Everything else behaves as usual: text, buttons, images, form fields, coupons, countdowns, surveys and product recommendations all work on a fullscreen.
A word about mobile
Fullscreen campaigns have their limits on small screens. Google's guidance on intrusive interstitials means a full-screen message on mobile can count against the mobile experience of a page, so we recommend keeping fullscreen for desktop and using a card popup on mobile. Well-designed, well-targeted campaigns are not in danger — but on a phone a fullscreen takeover is a much bigger interruption than it is on a desktop.
Because desktop and mobile are two separate views of the same campaign, you can treat them differently: edit the mobile view on its own, and target the campaign by device on the campaign's Settings.