marketing

3 Best Ads Plugin for WordPress Website

Many blogs and large traffic sites depend on advertising as their primary source of income. You may use Google AdSense, AdSense alternatives, Affiliate Ads, or Direct Ad sales. The one problem that many encounter is that advertising as a monetization strategy is hard to maintain, and difficult to manage. Running with your AdSense code and your WordPress theme can quickly become a nightmare for many. And just try to keep track of the banners you sell on your website.

Fortunately, these problems can be easily fixed, if you set up a professional ad management plugin on your WordPress site. According to a study by WordStream, mobile ads have a 40% higher CTR than desktop ads, so don’t forget to optimize your ads for mobile. We’ve put a detailed comparison of the 3 best WordPress advertising plugins that you can use to boost your blog revenue by providing an all-around better ad management solution.

Ad Inserter

This is a solid and well-developed WordPress advertising plugin; it’s highly recommended to start with Ad Inserter. With currently 40,000+ active installs, and 4.9 out of 5-star rating. It is one of the most well-maintained plugins on the repository, and the developer is very active in the support forums.

The Ad Inserter plugin allows you insert an ad, from Adsense to Affiliate ads or any code (HTML/Javascript/PHP) into WordPress. Use for all kinds of ads. There are free version and a premium version of the plugin. The plugin is recommended by Amazon.

A great thing about this plugin is that it lets you insert ads at anywhere in your post. You can do it before/after the post content, or even by a percentage of the way down your content (or the number of paragraphs). You could place an ad after the free first paragraphs, or exclude specific pages and posts if you don’t want an ad to show up; it is all automatically set, no shortcodes to mess with.

Additional features include:
  • 16 code blocks
  • Syntax highlighting editor
  • Code preview with a visual CSS editor
  • Manual insertion: widgets, shortcodes, PHP function call
  • Block alignment, style: left, center, right, float left, float right, custom CSS, no wrapping (leaves ad code as it is, otherwise it is wrapped by a div)
  • Clearance options to avoid insertion next to images or headers
  • PHP code processing
  • Server-side and client-side device detection (3 custom viewports)
  • B&W list categories, tags, post IDs, URLs, URL parameters, referrers

AdRotate

AdRotate is one of the oldest and most popular choices when it comes to a WordPress plugin for advertising. It has 50,000+ active installs, and a 4.3 out of 5-star rating. It’s been around since early-mid 2014.

AdRotate is an impressive advertising manager with pretty much all the bells and whistles. Easy management enables you to edit your ad display right from your dashboard. Add, configure, delete, and preview multiple banners in seconds. You can set ads to display to visitors accessing your site only from a certain location.

Schedule each ad to expire after a predetermined period of time, or after a certain number of impressions or clicks. Choose to be notified when an advert is about to expire (either by email or a push notification on your iOS/Android device). If you sell advertising space on your blog, advertisers can email you directly from their dashboard.

AdRotate offers extensive ad tracking and monitoring; it’s easy to see which ads are performing best, and which are doing poorly at a glance. Follow CTR (click-through rate), daily/monthly stats, and more are also visible and everything can be exported in CSVs. One of its most special features is the ability to detect when a visitor uses an ad blocker, and then display a small message accordingly (e.g. “You have an ad blocker enabled, to get the most out of our website, we suggest you turn it off.”). Display ads also through shortcodes, widgets, or your theme’s PHP.

Additional features include:
  • Complies with Google AdSense, DFP, and most other referrer/ad servers
  • Automated Javascript cycles of ads with Dynamic Groups
  • Advertisers can add/edit/manage their ads, and contact you
  • Allow Paypal payments from the dashboard when selling adverts
  • Mobile adverts (differentiate tablets from phones)
  • Protect adverts from ad blockers so they’re not removed
  • Use stats easily, and follow how each advert is performing
  • Responsive ads
  • Place random, or selected, banners in pages or posts
  • Manage groups per banner location
  • Show multiple ads on one grid, column or row
  • Automate, or disable ads after they expire
  • Allow shortcodes, widgets or PHP to put ads on your site

AdSense Plugin WP QUADS

The AdSense Plugin WP Quads is a fork of Quick AdSense ads plugin which discontinued, and used to be the most downloaded advertising plugin. It’s rewritten from scratch with a solid code base and has great support. It currently has 20,000+ active installs with a 4.9 out of 5-star rating.

If you need to get AdSense up and going fast on your site, this is a great solution. If you are still using the old Quick AdSense plugin this has a “quick import” so you can migrate over easily. One new feature, is that it supports Google AMP ads. Just like with the plugins mentioned above, this one also has a free and premium version. It also focuses on performance, and it has no external script dependencies.

Some of the additional features include:
  • Drop Google AdSense ads specifically or randomly anywhere within a post
  • Support any Ads code, and not limited to Google Adsense only
  • Place up to a maximum of 10 Ads on a page.
  • Supports up to a maximum of 10 Ads codes on Sidebar Widgets.
  • Supports up to a maximum of 10 Ads codes for specific placement & randomization within a post.
  • Use shortcodes within ads

Conclusion

There are many great solutions to make advertisement management easier in WordPress. Most of the plugins are completely free. You can extend them with additional premium features (Google AMP support and geo-targeting). So, we don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t start testing better ad placements, A/B testing, and optimizing ads for mobile.