WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for this video.
Using WP Pro Advertising System – All in one Ad Manager
Hello, this is John Overall from WP Plugins A to Z.com and this is one of the training videos to replace the ones I currently have online and this one will be covering the WP Pro Ads Manager Plugin. So of course, like any other plugin out there, the first thing you’ll need to do is upload and install that plugin to your site. And I know people have done it a million times, but we’re going to go ahead and show you how it’s done again – just because.
So of course, go to your Install Plugins window. Click on Add New – it takes you there. You can upload the plugin. It asks you to choose the plugin you want and you will find it on your computer wherever you might have it lying. And in my case, I’m doing it off-screen, so it makes it just a little easier and we’ll have to go find it. Once it’s found, you’ll see it puts it right here in this spot here. As usual, just install now. It uploads it from your computer and installs it.
Now because I’m already in this point here and we’re going to be eventually showing the next plugin that is part of this is the paid Ads Manager add-on, I’m going to go ahead and upload that plugin to be used. That is the buy and sell add-on for the plugin. So we will upload that in the same manner and then from here, we can then return back to the Plugins page itself. Go find the plugin that was installed, WP Pro Ad System, and then you’ll want to activate the plugin. A quite simple thing to do.
Now they’ve got new statistics in here. If you’re upgrading the plugin, you’ll get this. If it’s going new, always go with Use New Statistics for it. That way, you’ve got the latest bits of information available. Now what it’s going to do for you is it’s going to create a menu over here called Advertising. This menu when you first set everything up is going to require you to do things in a very specific order, and that order is going to ask you to create ad zones, banners, campaigns, and advertisers. There’s an order for doing that and this is a pretty key element for building this plugin.
So we’ll click onto the Advertising. Now if you don’t do it in order, you’ll be double-backing upon yourself as you put it all together. So the first thing you actually need to create in here is you’re going to have to create ad zones. This is going to be the zones where your ad is going to be displayed. This is your typical ad block areas such as the 460 x 80 banner ad, a 728 x 90, a 250 x 250 block in the sidebar – whatever banner sizes you’re going to be creating. That’s what you’re going to want to create here with the ad zones.
What you’ll do – and I’m only going to create one ad zone to walk you through this plugin here. So you’ll want to go create a new ad zone, and the ad zone I’m going to create here is a 728 x 90 banner. That’s going to be top of the page. Okay, go here, select the ad zone leaderboard. You don’t want to hide it on any devices and always choose a variable. Now what this is for is the ad zone will adapt to the height of the banner if you happen to put a banner in that’s not perfectly the exact hight for it, and that happens from time to time when you’re creating banners. Sometimes it’s off a little.
So you’ll want to come down here – actually before we go down, you’ll see that it’s got three device settings here. Now you don’t always have to do this, but I always do just to make sure that the device has got it all set up correctly to use the correct size banner in this block. What it would allow you to do is allow you to still go into that block there and create different sizes for that ad zone, depending on the device. We’re going to have it all the same size.
Go down, create a description. This is the ad zone for the top of the website. Max amount of banners – now this one’s kind of important if you’re selling banners. You’ll want to limit the number of banners that can be placed into this zone, and the reason being is you don’t want to oversell your inventory. We’re going to select five here. Rotate the banners – I like to rotate the banners if I get more than one banner into an ad zone, simply because well, it looks kind of cool to watch the banners go through plus they get more impressions in there.
You use the default slider; it works well. The rotation time – this one’s kind of variable. I have found that about 11 seconds works very well for rotation time. It’s time enough for everyone to see it and time enough for it to change out if they’re on the page long enough. Lead to the default rotation effect. The banner loading order – you can load it in a fixed order, one, two, three, four, five, in equal views. Each one gets viewed the same number of times, or in my case, I like to just let it hit random.
AJAX Rotation – this one is really kind of cool because if you don’t choose AJAX rotation, what it means is the banner only changes every time it reloads the page. What this does with AJAX Rotation is every 11 seconds, it’ll change out that ad in an automatic rotation – really kind of cool. Now you could also have an ad grid. This is very useful if you’re using 125 x 125 ads, because then you can have it display the ads in say 2 x 2 or 2 x 8 high, or any combination thereof that’s going to work for you.
Now centering the ad zone, highlight the center of the ad zone, because it puts it right dead center on the block that it’s in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a webpage, whether it’s in the middle of any other layered area. Wherever you put the ad zone, it will automatically center it for the space. Hide it if it’s empty. I like to do that. That way, the ad zone is not displayed when there’s no ads; it just automatically disappears.
And then you can also upload a default banner into this zone. You can do that by uploading some sample banners to your website. I’ve got some sample banners or other banners. Insert it – this’ll be the banner that’s inserted into the site as the default banner for it – and the default link.
Okay, so that’s everything for that. Then you just come to the top and publish your new ad zone. Once that’s published, then what you need to do is you need to go create a couple of banners – excuse me – you actually need to go create a campaign first. And to add a new campaign, click on Campaigns/Add New Campaign – and I was off again. We actually need to create the advertiser first. So you need to get your advertiser, you did your ad zones – ad zones, advertisers, campaigns, and banners. You should have them in order; that would be much easier to do.
So let’s add a new advertiser. Okay, add the advertiser – it’s just the username and the email address. That’s just for tracking purposes. Then we need to create a campaign. This is so you can display your banners in a proper timeframe. Select the advertiser it’s going to be for. If you leave empty the campaign as always active, you could put dates, a start date and end date just by choosing it. Campaign timing – when it should be running – so you can have it run specific times of day. So say for instance you’ve got a specific campaign that can only run – maybe it’s a breakfast special advertising campaign – and you run it from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. You can do that sort of thing. We’re going to leave that blank, too. So we’ll publish that.
And now that we have a campaign ready, now we’re ready to get in here and create the ad. Okay, so now that the campaign has been published, now we can go in and create the banner ad. It’s going to create a couple of banner ads here, so you click Add New Banner and we’re just going to call it “Banner 1.” Stay on the page – Banner 1. Okay, select the advertiser (who’s going to get it credited). Select a Campaign – “Sample Campaign.” Link – this is where you want to link it to something.
Target – load it in a new window. Link masking – it’s always recommended but you could turn it off if you want. Status – we’re going to make it active. Banner type – banner URL or we upload a banner. You can have a banner elsewhere but since we’ve already created a couple here, we’re going to insert them. Okay, we’ll insert that one with 728 x 90.
You could put HTML codes such as a Google AdSense banners or any other advertising company out there that you get HTML code from. Place that in there. If you buy their add-on for visual banner creator. You can then use this module here to customize and tweak your banner in multiple ways. It doesn’t work for me because I don’t have that add-on. I create my own banners in Photoshop and other programs.
Link the banner to an ad zone, so you have to save it once before it can be linked to an ad zone, so we’ll be saving it and coming back to this feature. No follow – you’ll always want to set No Follow to your banner links because they’re advertising links and you want Google to do that. You could have it transition, contracts, and other things in here that we won’t be using. Okay, we hit Publish and wait for it to publish. Then we come back down, make sure everything is still good all the way down the line. And now we go plug it into an ad zone.
Once it shows the block here for the ad zone, then go back up and hit the Update button. Okay, that’s one banner, so now we’re going to add a second banner, “Banner 2.” User/Campaign – okay, load a new window. Use masking, change from draft to active, the banner is already uploaded so we can just go select it. Again, you could use HTML 5 code more, set to No Follow, back to the top, publish it.
Okay, once that’s published, go down and make sure everything is still set the way you want it. Link your ad zone – and for some reason pages didn’t load correctly, so we will reload the page. Okay, the page has been reloaded and what we’re going to do here is we’re going to go back down the page and choose our ad zone. There we go. Make sure No Follow, all of the other things set, hit the update on it, and these two banners are now active.
Now what we want to do is we’re going to look at a couple of quick things here. We’ve got the ad dashboard; this is your general dashboard here, and they show you the things you can do real quickly: go add new advertiser, campaign, banners, ad zones. Once you get your license key, you can insert your license key here to register the plugin to get auto updates. Check your statistics – it’ll show your stats. Basic plugin options – general settings, enable admin bar – yes. Uninstall option – no. This one here, if you are uninstalling a plugin because of errors, you don’t want to remove your data. If you’re just removing the plugin because you no longer want it, hit yes.
The other is the Ad Zone Class. The default class is WPPAZAS Zone. Now you can change that to something else you want and of course, what they say here is if you want to mislead or keep ad blockers from finding you, change the name from time to time to something random. It helps keep ad blockers from blocking your ads – one of the ways. Enable clean permalinks – you can do this and then it’s going to ask you for a link prefix, but you won’t need that.
Statistics enabled, disable impressions – do you want to enable impressions from being saved? I like to save my impressions. Disable clicks – do you want to disable the clicks? No, if you want to disable impressions, that needs to be a no. Statistics version – new version is recommended. Then you’ve got to go down to Statistic Data. You can hourly to daily stats. Now, hourly stats will grow your database fast. If you’re a busy website, you might want to just go with daily stats.
Enable user stats – yes. But the geo data will only be available if you get the Pro Targeting add-on for this, so that’s something to consider. The Pro Targeting add-on costs $13, so it’s probably worth the money if you want to track your stuff completely. Save impressions – do you want unique or all impressions to be saved? Now, sometimes you want all the impressions; sometimes you just want the unique impressions. You’ll have to experiment with that one.
Save clicks – unique or all clicks on ads, days to save the stats – now this one here is to help keep your database from getting too large. We’re only going to keep the last 36 days. You can block out IP addresses. Now what this is good for is it’s good for blocking out your own IP address. They tell you what your IP address is here, so you can place your own IP address in here to block it out.
Allowed origins – add the domain names for the external websites that’ll be able to use the asynchronous js tag to show banners. This is so you could actually create a website that hosts all of your advertising and then use the code and the asynchronous text on other websites to show the banners. You can have one central place for running all of your ad banners; kind of a useful feature of this plugin and one of the really powerful things I’ve found, considering once upon a time I used to use the Open Source Ad Manager program – not plugin. It’s a program. But it became too much trouble to keep it up-to-date.
Google Analytics – place your Google Analytics code in here. I won’t be doing that because this is only a demo site. But on your live site, you’ll want to put your Google Analytics code in and Google can track your ads for you, too. W-3 total page caching – if you use page cashing with W-3 Total Page Caching, you can enable this. I won’t be using it, so I’ll disable it.
Style it – You can customize the style sheets for it to your heart’s content. We’ll save those settings. What else do we got? Manage Ad Posts – Enable Post Ads. This allows you to add banners to all posts automatically. This one’s kind of useful if you want to have ads appear automatically on your post. You can just go choose your post type, either all posts or all pages, portfolio in this case on this particular theme has a portfolio theme, so we’re going to put it into posts just for fun.
Now what banner will show in these is important. Now you can put a top ad above the post or you can put a center ad in the post. So this is where you would create a specific ad, usually the 468 x 60. We’re just going to have it with the 728 x 90 for demo purposes. Center the ad – how many paragraphs after it do you want the ad to show? You can choose up to six paragraphs. The ad align – left, right, or default, which is hopefully centered. Bottom ad – this ad will show underneath the post, so you can put ads – three ads – on your site, just by coming to this one particular section here without a whole lot of extra work because it will automatically place them in there.
Manual updates – this is where you can update the campaign banner statistics. And then if you get the buy and sell ads, you can add it here, so you can download and add the buy and sell ads. Now that add-on, I’ve already uploaded it as you saw at the beginning, and I will be doing a training video on how to use that. But the big thing that’s going to happen is that video will not appear here on my YouTube channel for everyone to see. It’s going to only be available to those who support the WP Plugins A to Z website and the podcast that goes with that website. Everyone will be able to access it through the WP Support forums and membership section of the WP Plugins A to Z website. So look for it there and anyone who has left me a comment on my original YouTube channel previous to this being published, send me an email. I’ll happily make you a member of the site for one month so you can access the stuff.
Okay, so that’s everything in the plugin options. So now that we’ve covered those, now it’s time to go place an ad in a regular website or webpage. What we’re going to do is we’re going to bounce over to the front page of the website here, and of course this is my sandbox web page. Right now I need to have it load the page. Okay, this is the front page of the website.
Now what we’re going to do with it is we are going to place an ad banner right up above this slider here. To do that, this is the end fold theme and it uses a builder – the Avia Layout Builder program. So what we’re going to do is we’re just going to get a content element here and then we’re going to place the ad banner into that block. And so what this one’s going to do is we’re going to do it with the widget area. So we’ll grab a widget area, we’ll place it in here into the block, and of course I realized we forgot to build out the custom widget area, so we’re going to save that. Actually, we’re not going to save it; we’re just going to bounce on over to the widget area – leave the widget page – and go create a custom widget area.
And with this, we will then place the advertising – display your ads banner block here. Okay, we’ll select the ad zone for 723 x 90, top of block. And since it’s a custom widget area, it will be ready for us now when we go back to the front page to edit that front page. Then we’ll just select Edit Front Page again, come back in here, select Content Element, Widget Area. Use the top banner widget area (and yes, I have children as they’re looking for Pokémon emojis).
Okay, we’ll update this then we’ll go look at the front page, and we should have our banner ad right at the top of the page now. And there it is: nicely placed, nicely centered. If we sit here for 11 seconds, we should see it rotate through, and it’ll be all done and set. And there it goes, rotated through. So there you go; that’s exactly what you need for the WP Pro Ads Manager System and everything you need. So thanks for listening to this and I greatly appreciate your time. Hopefully this helps. If it does, feel free to contact me at my website, johnoverall.com or send me an email to john@wppro.ca. Or if you feel like giving me a call, I do take phone calls: (818) 850-7729. Take care now, bye-bye.
Okay, this is an addendum to the WP Pro Advertising System Plugin. A couple of things that I didn’t cover in the initial setup. These are kind of important features that as you go along, you’ll want to know about. Now the first one we’re going to talk about here is how to get the ad onto other websites or into other places within your website using short codes or additional code. Now we showed you real briefly back there how to create your ad zone and how to place banners into the ad zone.
One of the things you can do is once you go to the ad zones, it’ll list up all the ad zones you’ve created. So if you created multiple ones, you’ll see them all listed. The first thing you can do is you can look at the linked banners here and when you pop it up, it’ll show you all the banners that are linked to it. Then you can also change the order they are in. You can’t add or remove banners but you can see which ones are linked.
The next one is the Get Code. This here allows you to place these banners on other websites or in post short codes. So if you’re going to place it in another post on here, you can use this here, the post tag short code. And they have a short code editor that you can then open up and you can choose an ad zone, default options, whether it’s AJAX loaded, hi-def logged in, etc., etc., etc. Then you can go down to ad zone padding, style, border radius – you can do a lot of customizations to the ad zone code. Then it will give you a piece of code at the end of what you’re going to do.
The next thing down is a template tag. If you want to build your custom theme or template, you can embed these in here using a template tag. The other one is one we briefly touched on. We talked about the asynchronous js tag. It used to be a normal Java script tag, but now it’s asynchronous because of course that helps your website load faster. So you would need this piece of code here first and you would place that where you want the ad to appear on the other website. And then if you’re putting it on a website that’s not the same domain, you need to add this piece of code to it here so that it knows where to get the Java from. Plus, you have to add the domain you’re going to allow back in the settings. If you just want to I-frame the ad, you can I-frame the ad. I-frame works quite nicely but of course it loads slower.
Ten the final one here is the RSS feed. Now each ad zone has it’s own unique RSS feed and you can use this with Mail Chimp newsletters to import your ads directly into the newsletters you send out to Mail Chimp. Now I’ve kind of had a hit and miss success with this in Mail Chimp newsletters. I’m not sure why or what was happening, but I’ve had a couple of sites that it worked on, a couple that it hasn’t worked on, so it’s been kind of hit and miss. If you get it to work, more power to you. If not, don’t waste a lot of time trying to make it work because there’s something glitch about it. But that’s how you get the ads placed in other places.
Now the other thing you can do with it is you can go into the site here and I didn’t show you how the ads were displayed when you used that autofill function for a post. So if we go look at a post for the website, we can see here when we set it up, we chose to have three ads placed in here: one at the top of the post which comes in in this particular theme right underneath the main image at the top of the first paragraph. Then the second one is after a couple of paragraphs in. It places the center banner. And then at the bottom, it places the other banner ad. So you can do that with multiple banners in numerous ways you can do that and have it handed. This is something kind of nice to look at.
These are little features and little tweaks to the program. It is a great plugin to have to your website. And a couple of other little touchy things here, if you want to see what your advertisers are up to, you can go here, look at your advertisers, go click on the stats button. It’ll then pop up the stats for all of their stats, their impression. You can export it as a PDF file, so if you have people looking for stats, this is a great way to deliver those stats. It works fairly well. I have had some glitch displays with this here, the timeline of ad statistics, so it’s kind of hard to say.
Ad zones themselves, again, you can get the stats by going to the stats for a particular ad zone, and it does a pretty decent job of showing them. Campaigns, same thing. The same thing in the campaigns shows you the linked in banners, etc., and then the advertisers themselves. You can look up each individual advertiser.
So that’s all we’ve got for you. If you want more, please go visit WP Plugins A to Z.com and visit our YouTube channel there also. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks a lot for your time. Take care now. Bye-bye.