When your website grows and rankings and traffic develop favorably, the question of how to monetize it eventually arises.
An answer to your question is provided by the free Advanced Ads plugin best ad plugin. The plugin has been developed by a team of experienced editors since 2014.
Back then, Advanced Ads was born out of the need that there simply wasn't an easy-to-use plugin for optimizing advertising on WordPress sites.
Today, Advanced Ads offers publishers large and small around the world a comprehensive toolbox for ad integration and optimization. It is extremely helpful for the team to have experience as editors of websites with massive traffic.
Why do you need a plugin to manage ads?
Few webmasters want to monetize their site with automatic AdSense ads alone. Instead, most want to influence the type and placement of ads to ensure better conversions and user experience.
Since manually inserting ads into existing posts is time-consuming and offers little room for ongoing optimization, for most sites, only a plugin comes into play that embeds these ads automatically.
A proper ad management plugin should offer the following features:
– the ability to automatically place ads in all desired positions on your website
– options for targeting ads to content and visitors
– rotating ads to avoid ad blindness
– ad planning and scheduling
What Advanced Ads Can Do
The free Advanced Ads plugin meets these requirements and takes ad management to a new level.
The Advanced Ads interface is deliberately based on WordPress to simplify getting started. For example, ads are managed similarly to posts.
Non-coding ad types
Advanced ads support any ad code in JS, HTML, CSS or PHP. You can use this to manage ad network codes like AdSense, media.net or even Amazon affiliate banners.
Also, it comes with predefined ad types that allow you to set up ads without any coding skills. Among them are
- display ads
- Rich content using a WYSIWYG editor
- AdSense Ads
- Google Ad Manager Ad Units
- AMP ad
A comprehensive layout section lets you set margin for other elements or ad alignment within text content. Additionally, developers can deliver custom code per ad and define their own CSS classes.
Ad targeting to specific pages
Using Display Conditions, you can target ads to specific content and pages.
For example, you can serve ads by
- Post type, e.g. posts, pages or custom
- Author or age of content
- Post categories, tags, and custom taxonomies
- URL
- Any specific post or page, e.g. your contact page
Targeting ads to specific visitors
In addition to display conditions, Advanced Ads offers the visitor targeting conditions based on the characteristics of each visitor.
The most popular conditions are
- User device, e.g. smartphone, tablet or desktop
- browser width
- User role, login status or detailed features
- Geographic location
- cookie value
- Number of previous page impressions
- Number of previous ad impressions and clicks
- referral url
ad scheduling
If you sell ads directly or have time-specific campaigns, you will appreciate the advanced ad scheduling feature.
You can set the start of a specific ad and its expiration date. Combined with tracking, you can also distribute a specific amount of impressions and clicks evenly over a certain period.
Ad rotations for testing and advanced settings
You can group multiple ads together for a single ad rotation. This allows you to sell the same ad space multiple times as well as test different ad networks or ad copies for conversion.
Ad groups also allow you to fill a sold space with a replacement ad once the original ad expires.
In addition to these standard rotations, you can use the Ad Slider add-on or enable the refresh option to automatically reload ads while the user remains on your site. This increases the visibility of various ads on your site.
Automatic ad injection with placements
Advanced ads allow you to choose between placing ads manually using a shortcode or PHP, or placing ads automatically by choosing from one of many predefined placements.
Placements allow you to automatically inject ads into posts and pages, place the same ad multiple times, or test different placements against each other.
Most placement types in Advanced Ads automatically place ads in predefined positions, such as in the middle of the content, after the post content, or in the sidebar.
Also, various conditions can be combined with custom rules. Even injecting ads by paragraphs containing certain words is possible. The Advanced Ads documentation includes some examples of this.
In addition, Advanced Ads can also insert code in the area or in the footer. Typical use cases for these placements are verification codes (such as from Pinterest), Google Analytics, or code snippets from various ad networks, for example for header bidding.
premium channels
Advanced Ads premium extensions extend available features with additional placements that improve performance, for example sticky banners or pop-ups. In addition, there are channels for placing ads on pages created by popular plugins like BuddyBoss, BuddyPress or bbPress.
Dedicated AdSense Support
A unique feature of Advanced Ads is its convenient integration with Google AdSense. You can connect to your AdSense account and import ads into Advanced Ads without having to manually copy any ad code.
Additionally, Advanced Ads can display individual ad revenue reports or the total revenue in your AdSense account directly from the WordPress backend. As the site is directly connected to the Google AdSense account, this data is not shared with third parties or with advanced ads.
In addition to revenue, AdSense account notifications can also be imported and displayed, eg alert if ads.txt file is not available. Advanced ads can create this file automatically.
Google AdSense Automatic Ads
In addition to manually placing AdSense ads, Advanced Ads also supports automatic AdSense ads. To enter the code necessary for this, simply select a checkbox. This option also supports automatic ads on accelerated mobile pages (AMP).
In the default settings, Enhanced Ads also ensure that these ads do not load on 404 error pages and, in doing so, automatically comply with AdSense terms.
Extending the features of advanced ads
Advanced Ads is a freemium plugin where you can extend the features of the free basic version with various premium add-ons.
Advanced Ad Pro
The most powerful add-on is Advanced Ads Pro. This extension comes with additional placements, display and visitor conditions, and technically sophisticated solutions for demanding ad setups. I will briefly mention some of these features.
Among them, for example, is the Lazy Load option. It allows you to load specific channels with a delay to significantly improve your site's page speed.
Built-in click fraud protection prevents abnormally frequent clicks on ads by protecting your account with networks like Google AdSense from suspension due to artificial clicks from malicious competitors.
If you enable the AdBlocker module of Advanced Ads Pro, you can display alternative banners to users with ad blockers. This allows you to monetize that traffic with affiliate banners.
Tracking
If you want to sell ads directly or optimize external ads using A/B testing, you can't bypass the tracking add-on.
This add-on records impressions and clicks on individual ads and allows backend evaluation and sending of corresponding email reports and shareable statistics.
You can connect ad tracking to Google Analytics to analyze it with other metrics in your Google Analytics reports.
This add-on also provides a way to mask outbound links, also known as link cloaking.
Google Ad Manager Plugin
The advanced ads Google Ad Manager integration is unique. It allows even less technical publishers to use the full ad server features of Google Ad Manager.
The plugin automatically imports ad codes and allows you to select options such as responsive behavior, AMP compatibility or key-value targeting via the interface, avoiding the typical coding errors when working with Google Ad Manager.
additional extensions
There are a few more useful add-ons offered by Advanced Ads:
- Geo-targeting to display ads based on the visitor's location, such as continent, country, or region.
- Sticky ads for sticky ads to the left or right of main content, as well as sticky header and footer bars.
- Layer popups and ads with different triggers, for example after a set time or when a visitor leaves your site.
- Responsive ads for automatic ad conversion to AMP format and for ad targeting depending on user's browser width
- Ads slider to embed ad groups as sliders
Coders love it
In addition to all the features mentioned in the Advanced Ads, another advantage is its smooth integration with the WordPress system. The pages on the backend follow the WordPress layout, so you can quickly find your way around without reading lengthy manuals.
But even more essential is the ability to customize the plugin and add your own features. Advanced Ads supports WordPress standards and provides hooks for customization.