Ads are the lifeblood of a site, and you can hardly go without ads on your WordPress site. While you can manually include ad codes in your theme, it’s much easier and more flexible to insert and remove ads with the help of a plugin. Here are seven great WordPress plugins to assist you in this task.
1. Ad Inserter
Maybe the most popular of all WordPress advertising plugins is Ad Inserter, and this is for a reason. It’s not an exaggeration to call it the heavy artillery of WordPress advertising plugins. Ad Inserter has so many features you might not need another ad plugin ever!
It works for any ad codes such as those from AdSense, Amazon, eBay, or any other ad network. You can choose where to place the ads – before or after post, content, paragraph, excerpt, multiple paragraphs, random paragraph, header, footer, any HTML element, etc. The free version comes with sixteen ad blocks only while the paid version offers sixty-four, but for most sites sixteen blocks are enough.
2. Advanced Ads
Advanced Ads is another very popular WordPress ads plugin. It doesn’t have as many features as Ad Inserter, but it is simpler to use and offers all the basics and more. It works with the major ad networks such as AdSense, Chitika, Amazon, BuySellAds, and DoubleClick (and maybe others as well). It has some great features such as ad rotation, ad drafts, and ad scheduling (i.e. you can set the date when to publish the ad).
3. AdSense Plugin WP QUADS
If you are interested in mainly AdSense ads, then you might want to try the AdSense Plugin WP QUADS. It doesn’t come with bells and whistles, but it allows you to place AdSense code in various places and based on different visibility rules, customize an ad’s appearance, choose which devices (e.g. phone, tablet, desktop) your ads are displayed on, etc.
4. Head, Footer and Post Injections
Although most of the other plugins on this list allow you to place ads in the header, footer, or the post itself, since these are among the best places to put ads, you might want a separate plugin for this. Head, Footer and Post Injections is not an ad-only plugin but does a great job of inserting and managing ads in the best places for this – the header, footer, and the post body.
For instance, you can add ads in the footer as well as your social media links, and you can do both with this plugin instead of getting two separate ones. The plugin offers very precise placing options, so you can put your ads (and other stuff) exactly where you want them.
5. Banner Ads Rotator
Even though Banner Ads Rotator isn’t the most popular ad rotation plugin in terms of active installs, I like it a lot, and this is why I decided to include it here. This plugin is easy to use yet flexible and offers great stats. As you can guess from its name, you enter banners to be rotated. You do this with the help of shortcodes. In addition to image banners, you can also rotate video and HTML banners.
6. Easy Plugin for AdSense
If you only need a plugin for AdSense and don’t need all the extra features other plugins offer, you can try Easy Plugin for AdSense. This is a simple and easy-to-use plugin. It comes in free and paid versions. The free version offers just ad placement, though the options here are numerous, and the paid one comes with more advanced stuff such as A/B testing, analytics, reporting, etc.
7. Popup Maker
Popups might not be a user’s favorite, but they do have their place among ad inventory. With the right plugin there are less annoying ways to display popups. Popup Maker is such a plugin. It comes in free and paid versions. The free version offers quite a lot – EU cookie notices, optin popups, slide-ins and slide-outs, modal forms, notifications, floating stickies, etc. The best is all these are responsive, and you can set rules for precise targeting for who sees what.
All these WordPress advertising plugins do a great job, especially if you place them in the right places. Though there are some well-known high-converting places, this doesn’t mean they work for you. You need to test a bit to see where your ads convert best and place them there. Fortunately, thanks to the numerous ad plugins for WordPress, this task isn’t that hard.
