WordPress automatically creates many pages with list of blog posts. These are feed pages, and you are allowed to place Google AdSense ads in-between posts in these feeds. This is another way to increase your AdSense revenue without additional effort. In this article, we will explain how to create in-feed ads and insert AdSense in-feed ads in WordPress.
In-feed Ads and WordPress Feeds
In our earlier article, we have explained the problem with WordPress RSS feeds and disabling them completely for external syndication. The term in-feed ad may easily confuse you thinking of placing them in RSS feeds. However, that is not the case. Earlier, Google was offering AdSense for Feed ads that you can deliver in email to your feed subscribers. However, Google discontinued this feed ads and introduced native in-feed ads. From in-feed ads perspective, feed is a list of content that users can scroll and read through. Google makes this clear on their help page mentioning the below note:
Note: For the purposes of In-feed ads, a feed does not refer to a web syndication feed such as RSS.
Google
With this context, below are some of the WordPress archive pages that you can use for inserting AdSense in-feed ads.
- Blog index page showing the latest list of blog posts
- Category and tag archive page
- Internal search result pages
- Date and author archive pages
In all these cases, make sure your page layout shows the list of posts with proper alignment in list or card view. A masonry view may not work as the alignment between posts may change in the layout.
In normal scenario, you can’t place the display ads in these feeds, and you miss the opportunity to make additional revenue. However, AdSense in-feed ads fill that gap and you can place them nicely without disturbing the layout and user experience.
Creating AdSense In-feed Ads
Google allows you to create in-feed ads in two ways. One is to use auto layout design from Google and other is that you can manually create the ad that fits your layout. In our opinion, both methods will result in similar display and you can try that matches your need.
- Login to your AdSense account and go to “Ads” section.
- Click on “By ad unit” tab and select “In-feed ads” option.
- As mentioned, you will see two options for creating in-feed ads.
Creating Ad Style Manually
Select “Create ad style manually” option if you want to check and select the styles yourself. You will see a list of ad styles with different image and text positions. Choose the one you like to proceed further.
On the next screen, you will see the preview along with few options to customize the style.
Using Google Suggested Style
We recommend choosing this option as it is easy as well as mingle properly on your layout.
- Choose “Let Google suggest a style” option.
- Enter your WordPress archive page URL.
- Select mobile or desktop crawler (you can change this in the next screen when previewing).
- Click on “Scan the page”.
- Google will start scanning your feed to grasp the layout.
- After that you will see a preview of blog posts on the page along with the preview of automatic suggested in-feed ad.
- You can any block on the page and Google will change the suggested ad style accordingly.
- If required, you can change the crawler to desktop and rescan the page to preview in-feed ad suggestion for desktop device.
- Clicking on “Next” button will take you to final customization page similar to manual ad style creation.
Customizing In-feed Ads
As you can see, there are not many customizing options available for in-feed ads.
- You can resize the page width and check how in-feed ad will look on your page.
- Enter unique ad unit name which you can track in performance reporting.
- Make sure to select “Allow selected display ads” option under “Global Options” section. This will allow Google to display normal display ads instead of in-feed ads in the feed pages if required. this essentially means you can earn more revenue by enabling this option.
- Choose the font for the text content in the ad.
- Click “Save and get ad code” button.
- You will see the in-feed ad code in next screen and copy the code by clicking on “Copy code snippet” link. You can keep this code on a plain text document to use on your site.
Tips for Placing In-feed Ads
You have to place the in-feed ads only in-between the feed blocks on your archive pages.
- Avoid placing in-feed ads on regular content, instead use display ad for this purpose.
- Similarly, avoid placing in-feed ads in the sidebar or footer area.
- Make sure the main container of your content has flexible height. This is important as fixed or max height container will lead to the ads placed on your post block and may end up in violating AdSense policy.
- You can place in-feed ad at the start, bottom or in-between post blocks in the feed.
Inserting AdSense In-feed Ads in WordPress
WordPress has some default options for inserting custom HTML code. You can insert AdSense ad code in widget area like sidebar and footer using Custom HTML widget. You can also easily insert ads inside the content using “Custom HTML” block. Many commercial WordPress themes offer custom advertising panel to insert ad codes in the content area. In addition, you can use hooks to insert on the predefined places of your theme. This hook element is available in popular themes like GeneratePress or Astra.
However, we do not see any theme that allows you to insert ads in the archive feed. Hence, the only and easy option is to use an advertisement plugin. Fortunately, there are handful of WordPress plugins available for this purpose. In this article, we will explain with Ad Insert plugin, other plugins like Advanced Ads also offers similar feature.
- Install and activate Ad Inserter plugin in your WordPress site.
- Go to “Settings > Ad Inserter” and place the Google AdSense in-feed ad code in one of the ad blocks. You have 16 blocks and choose any one and paste the ad code inside the editor.
- The plugin allows you to insert feed ads in multiple ways. You can simply enter the number of posts or enter the frequency between posts. For example, insertion “Between Posts” and “%3” will insert the same ad block after every 3 posts in the feed archive page. You can adjust the insertion frequency as per the number of posts available on your archive pages and the number of ads you want to show.
- You can select one of the default alignment or enter custom CSS in the box to adjust the alignment manually.
- Make sure to select search pages, category pages and tag/archive pages to display in-feed ads.
- After finishing as placement setup, click on “Misc” tab and go to “Insertion” section.
- Check the box that shows “Insert only in the loop” option to insert the ads only in archive posts loop.
- Click “Save settings 1-16” button and save your changes.
- Check the blog index or any other archive page on your site to confirm in-feed ads are displayed properly without disturbing the layout.
- It may take 10 to 20 minutes time to display the ad, especially this is a new ad code unit from your AdSense account.
Final Words
In recent days, Google enhanced AdSense account features and offer multiple ad formats. AdSense in-feeds ads can increase your revenue especially when you have lots of archive pages. This is also a way to use the archive pages to generate some additional revenue which otherwise go unnoticed. You can check the performance report for your ad unit and decide how much money you are making through in-feed ads. In case if you are not making much, any time you can disable the in-feed ads by disabling the ad block code in the plugin or completely disabling the plugin.
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