2 great WordPress ad managers

July 26th, 2011 by Jason Mayoff  Tags: admin, ads, clicks, expected, google adsense, impressions, linkshare, php, rotator, weighting, widget, wordpress
Filed under: Web

This is not a full review WordPress ad manager plugins. Not by any means. I just had the opportunity to go through a few, for a client, and thought I’d pass on what I came across.

I’ll only talk about two plugins. Each has its own benefits. I’ll tell you which one I recommended and why.

Max Banner Ads

This is an awesome app for WordPress users who don’t want to mess around with PHP code, or even WP shortcodes. It allows you to include ads in one of four spots on your site: above the first post on your pages, below the last post on your pages, as a widget in your sidebar or directly in the post itself.

You can adjust the alignment of any of those spots: right, left center, random or custom. When you choose custom, you can add any HTML/CSS you’d like before and after the ad.

You do not have to edit one single template file and if you want sidebar ads, you have only to drag the widget to your desired location in the sidebar.

Pretty nice.

You can use any size ads, although banners inside a post or in the sidebar may look a little strange, as would a big box above or below your posts. Nevertheless, you have that freedom.

You can also create blocks of small square ads, and decide how many ads to include per block.

Overall, a nice little plugin.

It’s missing a few things, however, that would turn it into a really powerful plugin, the biggest being that you can’t assign a relative weighting to the ads. Each ad is as important as all the others. If you have an advertiser willing to pay more, you really have no way of increasing her exposure.

There’s also no way to stop an ad from running after a certain number of impressions or clicks.

AdRotate

I looked around at several plugins first and finally chose AdRotate for its ease of use and power. It was only after installing and using it for a while that I was asked to take a look at Max Banner Ads in more detail, so this is a direct comparison of the differences, ie: what AdRotate has that Max doesn’t.

With AdRotate, you need to know your way around WordPress a little. You need to be able to find the spot in your theme’s template file(s) where you want the ads to appear. Or you can use a shortcode to include ads, groups or blocks within posts or pages. There is also a widget that easily allows you to include ads in your sidebar.

But, what AdRotate lacks in ease of setup, it more than makes up for in power.

The three things I mentioned that are lacking in Max Banner Ads are inlcuded in AdRotate.

You can assign relative weightings to ads, from Best Visibility to Barely Visible.

You can stop an ad from running after a certain number of impressions or clicks and you can define start and end dates for individual ads.

 

There’s also an option to define the number of expected clicks or impressions, which presumably figures into the reporting section of the plugin, which I have not yet explored and so I will not write about here.

Both of these plugins allow you to use an ad agency like Google AdSense or Linkshare, or to sell your own ads and choose the image file and link yourself.

My Recommendation

My recommendation on which of these plugins to choose, depends on your comfort level. If you absolutely do not want to dig through HTML files, then go with Max Banner Ads.

If you are comfortable with PHP and can read through and understand an index.php or single.php or style.css file, then AdRotate is a much better choice.

Do you have any better suggestions? What ad manager plugin do you use on your WordPress site?