Ad Inserter Plugin Wordpress

Using Ad Inserter to Manage Advertisements on Your Wordpress Blog

The Ad Inserter plugin is a feature rich and awesome plugin for displaying advertisements on your wordpress blog/website. A large number of wordpress blogs depend on advertising solely for revenue. Most bloggers monetize their blogs through advertising or affiliate marketing. In any case, if you are running any type of advertisements on your Wordpress blog, you will need a good advertising management plugin for managing ads. One of the most important concerns when laying ads on your blog is positioning of these ads. You need a powerful and yet easy to manage plugin to lay adverts in all the right locations in your posts and pages.

Ad Inserter is an excellent and feature rich plugin that can be used to lay just any kind of ad on your wordpress. It supports Adsense ads and you can use it to insert the analytics code, Amazon affiliate code or even a self generated ad code. The plugin has more than 300,000 active installations and an excellent 4.9 ratings (out of five) from more than 2,000 reviews.

There are several reasons that Ad Inserter is the most popular advertising plugin. First of all, even new users can easily use this plugin to lay ads on their blog. There is nothing complicated to set up or no need for advanced technical skills. Most of the settings can be easily understood and applied.

The plugin’s free version also includes almost all the essential features you will need to manage advertising on your Wordpress blog. From sixteen blocks to insert ad codes, and settings for inserting header and footer code, optimized positioning and a free virtual ads.txt, the Ad Inserter plugin includes every feature a blog may need for managing ads. Some features that are exclusively available with the pro version are mainly meant for high traffic and very large websites. The free features are generally more than sufficient for the smaller websites. Ad Inserter is one of the most complete advertising management solutions for Wordpress.

Lay Adsense Ads Using Ad Inserter

Ad Inserter includes sixteen blocks to lay ads on your blog. If you are using Adsense, the plugin provides special support for adding Adsense ad units to your blog posts. You will not need to copy and paste the adsense code each time when adding a new advertisement block. All you need to do is to simply connect the plugin with your adsense account. The plugin will automatically import all the blocks you have created in your account. You can check out the list of code blocks at the bottom of the plugin settings. Select the adsense ad block whose code you want to insert in a particular Ad inserter block. Ad Inserter will let you copy the code for the Adsense block from your plugin settings and without any need to login to the Adsense account.

Once you have connected to your Adsense account, it is easy to lay Adsense ads on your blog using this plugin. Otherwise, if you have not yet created ad units in your adsense account then login to adsense and create some units of different sizes according to your need.

Insert Ads into Posts/Pages With Ad Inserter Blocks

Ad Inserter offers you sixteen blocks that can be used to easily insert ads into your blog posts. While in most cases, you will not need more than five-six blocks, if you are planning to use different ad units for posts, pages and archive pages and so on, you might need more. These code blocks are labeled 1 to 16 and can be used to insert just any type of advertisement code.

Copy the code you want to add to your blog and then paste it into one of the blocks. Once you have pasted the code into the block, you can select the settings to position the ad right below the block. First you have six options regarding the types of pages on which you want to display the ad. You can select from these six options including homepage, posts, static pages, tag archives, search pages and category pages. If you want an ad block to display only on posts, select only posts and if you want it to display on posts as well as static pages, check both the options.

For example, you want to add an ad unit at the top of each page right before the content of each page including blog posts, home page, static pages, tag and category pages and so on. Select the ‘before content’ position and then all the page types on which you want to display the ad unit for that particular block.

Predefined Ad Positions to Insert Ads

The ad inserter plugin provides you 18 predefined positions to insert ads on. You can insert ads according to your choice inside blog posts in sidebars using the sidebar widget, inside the header/footer, after/before comments and after/before particular html elements.

Here is the list of placement options that come predefined with Ad Inserter:

• Before post
• Before content
• Before paragraph
• After paragraph
• Before Image
• After Image
• After Post
• After content
• Before excerpt
• After excerpt
• Between posts
• Before comments
• Between comment
• After comments
• Footer
• Before html element
• After html element
• Inside html element

Apart from the above listed positions, you can insert ad code or another code into the header or footer using the plugin. To insert a code into either header or footer, go to the settings button next to block 16. Click on the settings button. From here you can access the header and footer blocks for inserting code. You can also use your theme hooks to insert ads. However, that process is a bit technical but not very complex. You can access the hook settings also on the settings page. After inserting the code for header/footer, you will need to enable the block by clicking on the circular button that is provided on the right before the php button so that it turns green. Next, click on save settings.

Showing Ads Inside Post Content

If you want to show an ad unit inside your post content on blog posts, select only the posts and then fill in the number of paragraphs where you want to show the ad. For example, you can select ‘before paragraph’ for position and then in the paragraph count box add ‘2’ for displaying the ad before the second paragraph of each post.

If you want to set a limit for any ad block regarding the length of the paragraphs after/before which to display the advertisement, then you can set that too. For example, if you want an advert to display after the second paragraph but only if that paragraph has between 200 and 300 words, you can do that by toggling the paragraph counting settings next to the box in which you filled the paragraph number. Now, you can add the word limit for each paragraph before/after which you want to display that particular advertisement.

You can also select to display ads after or before content. If you select to display an ad ‘before content’, it will display right after the title and at the bottom where the content ends if you selected ‘after content’. If you select before post, the ad will display right above the post title. Similarly, if you select to display an ad after the post, it will display under the post below the previous/next buttons and above the comments. With the Ad Inserter plugin, you can also display ads before/after/between comments.

If you want, you can select to not show the ad on the first few or last few paragraphs by adding the number of paragraphs after which ‘Ad Inserter’ should start counting inside the paragraph counting settings where it says ‘Do not insert for the first __ and last __ paragraphs’. Once you are done, you will need to click on save settings to start showing ads. If you want to disable an ad unit, you can simply remove that ad unit or disable it from the drop down list from which you selected the position of the paragraph.

You can align the ad using the alignment option for each block. For example, you can set the ad to display on the left/right/center. However, if you like, you can float the ad right or left using alignment in which case, the ad will be positioned on the left or right and surrounded by text. You can also use your own custom css for the advertisement.

Managing Word Limit for Posts

All the posts are not of equal length. While some posts may be less than 1000 words long, some may be 2000 words or longer. In that case, you might be interested in having different settings for different post sizes. For example, you might want to show only two ads inside posts that are between 500 and 1000 words, and four ads on those which are 1500 - 2500 words. To manage this, you can set the word limit for individual posts.

Go to the concerned advertisement block in Ad Inserter and then click on the ‘Misc’ button under that block. It will expand the options and you can click on ‘Word Count’ to insert the word limit for posts on which to display that advertisement. Now fill the word limit inside the blank boxes. For example, to specify a word limit of 1500 to 2500 words, add 1500 in the first and then 2500 in the second box.

Adding code manually to individual posts and pages

By default, you have automatic insertion enabled for each code block you created in ‘ad inserter’. However, if you want to show an ad block in your desired positions, you can manually insert that advertisement by not selecting a position but using the shortcode or php function to add that block to your blog posts. To do that, click on manual and then copy the short code or php function provided by Ad Inserter.

Device Based Targeting with Ad Inserter

The free version of Ad Inserter includes a lot of features and in most cases, you will not need to look any further for any feature you might need to manage advertisements on a simple wordpress blog. It also allows you to target users based on the device type. For example, you can select to show an ad either on desktop or only mobile devices. You can use either client side or server side detection to display the ad by device type.

You have three options in this regard including desktop, tablet and mobile. If you want to show an ad on all devices, you will not need to set the device targeting options. However, if you want you can have different ads in different positions for different device types. For example, you can select to show an ad before the post only on desktop devices by selecting desktop and leaving the other two boxes unchecked.

To achieve that, go to the block in which you want to make changes. Now, click on the ‘Device’ button below that block and then in the settings that show up check the boxes for the devices on which you want to show that ad. For example, if you want to show an ad unit on desktop and tablet devices, check these two and leave the mobile option unchecked.

This is not all about the Ad Inserter plugin and there are many more settings, some of which you might not explore unless you have a large website. The free version offers a lot of features, one of which is the ads.txt option. You can enable it to let the plugin create a virtual ads.txt file for your blog. You can also set an ad blocker message for your users in the ad blocker settings by going to settings where you edited the header/footer code settings. The pro version offers some extra features that can be very useful in case you want to deal with ad blockers. It will provide you ad blocker statistics as well as the option to hide or modify content if an ad blocker is detected.

Ad Inserter also allows you to whitelist or black list categories, tags or url patterns to limit ad insertion. You can blacklist an entire category and its subcategories if you do not want a particular advertisement not being displayed in the posts belonging to that category. The pro version of the plugin allows you to limit insertion by ip or countries also.