You can check a campaign long before your visitors ever meet it. Start with the built-in previews; when you want to see the real popup on your real site — with the real triggers, rules, and integrations running — use the URL trick at the end.

1. Preview the popup itself

  1. Open Campaigns in the left menu and click the campaign.

  2. In the variants table, click Edit variant on the version you want to look at.

  3. The variant opens with a Preview tab and a Desktop / Mobile switch, so you can check both viewports at their real widths.

  4. Click Live Preview in the top right to open the popup in its own window — Open in a new window — your unsaved draft is shown too.

Nothing you do here reaches your visitors: Nothing changes for your visitors until you press Save.

Before a first go-live, the Review & go live screen puts desktop and mobile side by side and runs technical checks on the popup — for example No button is set to record a conversion, so this campaign won't track conversions. Fix what it flags before you switch the campaign on.

2. Share the design with a colleague

While you are still at the concept stage — before anything is built — every concept card has a Share link button. The link opens the design in a browser with no login, so a colleague or client can look at it: Anyone with the link can open it. You can also Copy it, send it with Email link, or Download PNG.

3. Test it live on your own site, invisibly to visitors

This is the classic trick: make the campaign show only on a URL nobody else will type. In this example we use ?optimonk=true.

  1. Open Campaigns and click the campaign.

  2. Go to the Settings tab and click the Who should see the popup card. The settings editor opens.

  3. Under Who should see the popup, click Add new rule.

  4. Choose Current page / URL — Show or hide on specific pages.

  5. In the Include block (Show campaign only on these pages), click Add pages.

  6. Leave the row on pages, set the operator to contains, and type optimonk=true into the value box.

  7. Click Save in the rule window, then Save changes in the editor.

Now switch the campaign on and visit your own site with the parameter appended:

https://mydomain.com/?optimonk=true

The popup appears for you exactly as it will for visitors — all triggers, targeting rules, frequency settings, and integrations are live — while ordinary visitors, who never have that parameter in their address, never see it.


Tip: you can also describe the change in the chat next to the panel instead of clicking, for example Only show on pages whose URL contains optimonk=true. The values in the panel update automatically.

4. Remove the test rule before you launch

Happy with what you saw? Do not forget this step, or your campaign will only ever show on the test URL.

  1. Open the campaign → Settings tab → Who should see the popup.

  2. Click the Current page / URL card to open it.

  3. Remove the optimonk=true row with the bin icon next to it (or delete the whole rule from its card), then Save.

  4. Click Save changes.

The summary should read All pages (no URL restrictions) again — or whatever page rule you actually want to launch with.

Good to know

  • Include rules are OR-ed and exclude rules always win: Include rules are OR-ed (the campaign shows if any include matches). Exclude rules always win: if any exclude matches, the campaign is hidden on that page. Leave Include empty to allow all pages.

  • Targeting rules are combined with AND — while the test rule is in place, all of your other conditions still have to match too. If the popup does not appear on the test URL, check the rest of the rules and the trigger.

  • The campaign has to be Active, and the OptiMonk code has to be installed on the domain for this test to work. The campaign page tells you if either is missing.