Many website owners try monetizing their websites to finance their projects and cover the running costs. One of the most popular ways to earn money from a website is through banner and display advertising.
Implementing ads into a website sounds relatively easy at first, but it’s challenging to generate revenue. This is where the Advanced Ads ad management plugin comes into play. It provides powerful tools to integrate ads into your website and optimize their performance automatically.
Advanced Ads Overview
Advanced Ads is a lightweight plugin that lets you set precise ads that you want to show to specific users and on what pages.
Advanced Ads is a freemium plugin. The free basic version already offers many ad targeting options, but you can expand on them with various add-ons for more placements and unique features.
How Advanced Ads works
Using Advanced Ads, you can assign ads on specific placements and embed them automatically at defined positions in your posts. For e.g., you can embed an advertisement after every third paragraph. You can also add single ads to groups and implement ad rotations this way.
Placements allow you to show single banners at selected positions easily. However, you can also implement highly complex ad setups to precisely target specific user groups or content types.
Watch this video to get an idea of how quickly you can create an ad and automatically insert it into your content.
Features and Benefits
The basic version of Advanced Ads already offers a lot of features and tools. You can create as many ads as you want, organize them into groups, and implement ad rotations, for example. The plugin can also embed ads while taking into account privacy standards, such as TCF 2.0.
You can create banner and text ads with Advanced Ads, but of course, you can also insert any ad code from your ad network (Google AdSense, media.net, or Amazon) into your pages.
For AdSense, there is a dedicated integration that allows you to import ads from your AdSense account without the need to copy your ad codes directly. Also, you can enable Auto Ads as well as AMP Auto Ads with one click only.
The free version offers various display conditions and some visitor conditions to target your ads to your audience. Showing ads only on mobile devices is just one example of the different kinds of targeting. If you need an ads.txt, don‘t worry, Advanced Ads can take care of that as well.
You can significantly expand the options and features of Advanced Ads with various add-ons. Popular features include click fraud protection, lazy loading, cache busting, pop-ups and sticky placements, geo-targeting, and ad grids. More popular extensions are the ad server options, various features to handle users with enabled ad blockers, Ad Tracking, or integrations with other plugins like WPML or BuddyBoss.
Convenient Google Ad Manager integration
The Google Ad Manager integration is particularly noteworthy in this context. This is a highly convenient way to add your GAM ads to WordPress.
If you’ve ever worked with Google Ad Manager (formerly DFP), you might remember the two-part ad tags you both had to integrate on your site.
You can handle it easily for a single ad, but when you want to target ads more precisely or part of an ad rotation, it gets complicated and sometimes a real challenge.
In this task, the Google Ad Manager add-on from Advanced Ads can support you perfectly and save you a lot of time. After you install this add-on and connect it to your GAM account, when you create a new ad, you can automatically import the ads created in your GAM account and use them on your WordPress site.
In doing so, the two-part header and body codes convert automatically to one-part codes. That significantly simplifies the management and handling of these ads since you no longer have to worry about matching the correct headers and body codes.
This integration supports responsive ads as well as key-value targeting. And of course, these GAM ads also work on the AMP version of your website.
Watch this video to get an idea of how the add-on works.
Protect your AdSense account from invalid traffic
If you are using Google AdSense ads on a larger website, you may have noticed that parts of your AdSense earnings have been cancelled due to invalid traffic.
This only amounts to a small part of their earnings for some users, while other users do not receive a significant portion of their earnings.
The negative consequences of invalid traffic, apart from revenue rejection, are that Google AdSense first blocks the delivery of ads on your website and the inserted ad codes remain empty.
In this case, you won’t earn anything at all with these ad slots. In the worst case, Google AdSense may also close your account forever.
Advanced Ads Pro offers Click Fraud Protection, a feature that prevents click bombing and unwanted clicks from bots or unpopular users.
For Click Fraud Protection, you can define how many times a user can click on an ad within a specific interval. If a user exceeds this limit, all ads are immediately hidden for a specified period. This way, you can significantly reduce the amount of invalid traffic.
Full integration with the TCF 2.0 privacy standard
In recent years, you as a webmaster have had to deal with many new regulations and laws regarding data protection. Whether GDPR, CCPA, or DSGVO, there are different rules in many regions, which you have to consider when integrating ads.
Not a long time ago, when Google AdSense announced the introduction of the new industry standard for online advertising, the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF 2.0), website operators have faced the challenge of obtaining the corresponding consent of their users ever since. Ads that load data from third-party sources may only display after granting this consent.
Advanced Ads offers a convenient integration that works at the push of a button. It does not matter which cookie or consent plugin is used on a website. As long as this consent solution is compatible with TCF 2.0, Advanced Ads can control the ads depending on the given consent.
Dedicated integrations with other plugins
Over the years, the number of plugins that Advanced Ads integrates with has been steadily increasing. So, in addition to native WPML and Polylang support and support for caching plugins, there are dedicated integrations for membership plugins like BBPress, BuddyPress, BuddyBoss, or Paid Memberships Pro as well.
Basically, you can target your ads precisely according to your users’ interests and characteristics to achieve the highest possible performance.
Powerful ad tracking
If you’re serious about optimizing your site, you must measure and analyze the performance of your ads. Otherwise, how will you know which positions on your site are working for ads and which are not?
Advanced Ads offers two local tracking methods that give you a privacy-compliant way to measure the performance of your ads. Plus, you can connect ad tracking to Google Analytics so that every ad impression and click show up as an event in your Google Analytics reports.
Advanced Ads Pricing
You can download the basic version of Advanced Ads for free on wordpress.org. There you can also find some additional free add-ons, e.g., for the integration with WP Bakery and Genesis themes, for sticky widgets, or the implementation of AdSense in-feed ads.
You can buy most of the add-ons separately. However, we recommend the All Access license, which includes all available add-ons and Advanced Ads Pro. For this license, there is also a long-term offer with a duration of 4 years. All the other plans have an annual term.
Final Thoughts
By now, more than 150,000 sites have installed Advanced Ads.
Positive reviews on wordpress.org illustrate this fact and testify to the satisfaction of users. Also, with extensive written documentation and a growing YouTube tutorials library, setting up the plugin is as easy as it gets.
All in all, Advanced Ads offers a wide variety of possibilities to manage your ads, optimize your revenue, and integrate it with your favorite ad managers.
Note: This article was published in collaboration with Advanced Ads.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
