How to Insert Advertisements in WordPress Site with Ad Inserter Plugin?

Many online users think reading the content in internet is free. They also use ad blockers to block advertisements on the websites to make their experience better. However, the reality of running a WordPress website is difficult task and needs a lot of money. Whether you are running a WordPress site for the sole purpose of making money or just to share your ideas, you need money to maintain the site for hosting, domain, email, plugins, themes, content writing, etc.  

Therefore, monetization is important for any site owner. One of the easiest ways to earn with your site is by inserting ads on your WordPress posts/pages. However, inserting ads in right position, replacing existing ones and managing their performance can be a real challenge. In this article, we will show you how to insert and manage ads in WordPress without becoming noisy to your readers.

When to Monetize Your Site?

As a website owner, you need to adapt the right practices to attract and retain visitors to your site. You need to publish interesting and relevant content that keeps your audience coming back for more. Fortunately, there are a variety of SEO tools that help in enhancing your visitors’ experience. Once you have an established authority in a niche, you have built a community of readers and a high number of visitors, it can be the best time to monetize your WP website.

Advertising in WordPress

Google AdSense is one of the popular and easy ways to make money from your website. Earlier, Google had an official AdSense publisher plugin for WordPress and now you have Site Kit plugin for integrating all Google services. However, many publishers use ad exchange networks like Mediavine, Raptive, Freestar, etc. In these cases, you need to rely on third-party plugins for manually inserting ad codes. Out of many plugins available, we recommend using Ad Inserter plugin for monetizing your website due to the fact that it is simple and quick.

Step 1: Install and Activate Ad Inserter Plugin

Ad Inserter is a free plugin for WordPress that helps you to manage advertisements on your site. On top of saving your time when inserting and managing ads, the plugin offers a host of extra features such as Ad block detection, A/B testing, PHP code insertion. You can insert any ad code from any ad exchange network including AdSense and Amazon.

• Log in to your WordPress admin panel. Expand the “Plugins” menu on the sidebar and choose “Add New Plugin” option.
• Type “Ads inserter” in the search box and wait for WordPress to load a list of available options. You can check the functionality of a plugin by clicking the “More Details” link.
• Find “Ad Inserter – Ad Manager & AdSense Ads“ plugin and click the “Install Now” button.

• After successful installation, activate the plugin to start using.

Step 2: Understanding Plugin’s Setup

Ad Inserter uses blocks to insert HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript codes anywhere on your site (pages, posts and custom post types). The free version offers 16 blocks and each allows you to display multiple ads or rotate ads within that block. To manage the ads code/ blocks:

• Go to the left sidebar “Settings” menu and click “Ad Inserter” from the options.
• You can click the numbers at the top of the screen to select a block. This will display the code editor for the block and the placement and target configuration at the bottom of the editor.

Step 3: Inserting Ad Code

You can insert ads anywhere on your website using Ad Inserter plugin. Click the block number, paste your ads code snippet in the code editor and save the changes. You can click on the tools icon for more options such as switching between the HTML visual and text mode. There is also a code generator to automatically generate ad scripts for AdSense setup based on publisher ID and ad slot number.

Step 4: Ad Placement Settings

At the bottom of the code editor, you can configure where on your site and how you want to display the ad.

• If you want to display the ad in your post, check the box for “Posts” and leave other options unchecked.
• Choose the automatic insertion position from the dropdown. For example, select “After paragraph” option and type 1 in the box. Select any of the alignment to position your ad or add your CSS in the box to use a custom setup.

• Finally, click “Save Settings 1 – 16” and use the “Preview” button to see and modify how the ad will display.

You can easily insert ads in-between content after certain number of paragraphs and in loops (like category and tag archives).

Step 5 – Target Settings

Below the code editor, you will find buttons like List, Manual, Devices, Misc and Preview to customize the target placement requirements.

• List – Click the “Lists” button to whitelist/blacklist specific content such as tags or categories among other options.
• Manual – Use the available options like widget, shortcode or PHP code to manually insert the ad in sidebar and widget area.
• Devices – Limit the ad to display on certain devices, mobile, tab or desktop.
• Misc – You can target specific users, schedule ads and control word count among other configurations.
• Preview – Check the display of ad and adjust the placement and custom CSS if required.

Using Ad Rotation

Ad Rotation is useful when you want to run A/B testing with multiple ad codes in the same slot.

• First, select the block number which you want to use.
• Click the “Tools” icon at the top of the block editor and click the “Rotation Editor” (icon at the middle).
• The ads within a block are assigned with letters A, B, C…. To add an ad, click the plus “+” sign and paste your ad code in the corresponding blocks. For example, paste your Amazon code in block A and AdSense code in block B.
• Enter the “Option name” in the text field and assign a share of impressions, scheduling and time for each slot.
• Click on the “Save Settings 1 – 16” button to apply the changes.

Using In-feed Ads

In-feed ads are one of the popular ad formats on smartphones. This will show ads in-between the posts on blog index, archive, taxonomies and search pages (called loop in WordPress). However, implementing this in-feed ads is very difficult for normal users as you need to insert the ad code in PHP loop. You need to understand the theme function to properly insert the in-feed ads so that it appears after every “n” number of posts (for example – after every 3 posts).

Ad Inserter makes this task simple by checking “Search pages”, “Category pages”, “Tag / Archive pages” for the corresponding ad block.

Other Plugin Settings

The free plugin also includes many other advanced features to run a full-fledged ad management setup. Frankly, you need plenty of time to understand all the available features in Ad Inserter plugin. Here are some of the useful features:

• Click ADS TXT button to manage your ads.txt file.
• For inserting header or footer code, click the gear settings icon showing after the block numbers and paster your code under “Header” or “Footer” tab.
• Under “General” tab, you can enable sticky ad widget using CSS or JavaScript mode.
• Go to “Ad Blocking” tab to create a custom message to show detecting ad blockers in user’s browser.

Manually Inserting Ads in PHP Templates

If you don’t like to use Ad Inserter or any other plugin, then there is a manual option for inserting ads with limited features. You can locate the correct the place on your post / page PHP templates (generally, single.php and pages.php files) and insert the ad code. In this manner, you can showcase the fixed ads on all pages of your site without a plugin. However, you can’t rotate ads, check A/B testing and detect ad blocking. Also, you need to add the code in the PHP files every time when you update the theme. So, this is definitely not a recommended way for a larger website.

Learn more on how to insert advertisement in WordPress without plugins.

Conclusion

The Ad Inserter plugin provides a range of features for WordPress site owners looking to incorporate ads into their pages or posts. Designed to be user-friendly for both beginners and experts, it simplifies and speeds up the process of inserting and managing ads. The free version is more than sufficient to manage your ads. However, upgrading to Ad Inserter Pro unlocks advanced features like geo-targeting, ad statistics, and much more. This will cost from €20 to €100 depending upon the plan you choose.