Managing advertisements is one of the most important things you can do as a WordPress blog owner in order to monetize your website. This is why we teach you things like how to insert ads within your post content in WordPress. Ideally, however, you want to make use of one of the many ad management plugins available for WordPress. Today we are going to talk about the AdRotate WordPress Plugin. It is one of the more simple to use plugins.
First, download and activate the plugin.
Creating and Organizing Ads
Once you have activate the plugin you should notice a tab on your dashboard that says “AdRotate”. In order to add your first add click on “Manage Ads” and then at the top click “Add New”. On this screen you will be prompted to fill in some information about the ad. Insert a title, your ad code, and fill in the display options.
Once you have added several advertisements you will want to organize them into “groups” so that you can display rotating ads. To do this select the “Manage Groups” option from the dashboard tab and click “Add New” at the top. From this screen you can add and remove ads to the group. All ads in this group will be rotated in one spot on your blog.
You will notice that their is also a “Manage Blocks” option in the sidebar. Blocks are essentially groups of groups. In other words, if you have several groups that you would like to “block” together, this is the where you would go.
Inserting Ads
Once you have set everything up the way you want it you will probably want to known how to include all of your ads, groups, and blocks on your blog. In order to do so you essentially have three options. You can use shortcodes, PHP, or the included widget. If you decide to use shortcodes we suggest you read our article on how to add a shortcode in WordPress to get a better understanding of what shortcodes are and how they behave. Remember that shortcodes can only be included in pages and posts so if you want to place your ads somewhere else you will have to make us of the widget or the PHP methods. To use the shortcode go back to the ad/group/block page and find the heading that says “Usage”. Underneath this you will see two options. The first is labeled “In a post or page”. This is your shortcode. Copy and paste this in any post or page to have your ads display there.
To use the PHP method you do the exact same thing. The other option on this screen is labeled “Directly in a theme”. This is the PHP code. Copy and paste this anywhere in your index.php, page.php, or single.php files to have your ads rotate there.
Your last option is to use the widget which can be found in the Appearance > Widgets menu. This will allow you to place your ads anywhere in the sidebar.
