I recently had a client who needed a simple way to add clickable image ads onto his site using widgets. He also wanted to be able to track clicks so that he could charge the advertisers. That doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it? But when I searched the Plugins Depository, more plugins were set up to work with AdSense or other affiliate advertisers than to allow simple self-hosted image ads. The plugins were either extremely complicated or so simple that they didn’t have the features I wanted. I finally decided to settle with AdRotate.
There is a free version and a paid version. For the sake of this tutorial I will be using the free version. One of my few complaints is that the free version shows all the tools for the pro version, but I can completely understand why the developer wants to do this – to sell the pro version. For the sake of simplicity though, it makes the admin panel pretty confusing. There are a lot of great options with the pro version and at a one time cost of only 25 Euro for a single site, it’s not a bad deal.
The features list is huge and includes the following for the free version:
- self-hosted banners and text links, Google AdSense and many other affiliate marketing companies
- the ability to show one ad, rotating ads, or a block of ads
- the ability to place ads in widgets or within posts/pages
- click tracking & impressions with graphs
As you can imagine, the pro version has even more great features including ad scheduling and the ability to let users see stats for their own ads.
My tutorials below will give you an idea of how the interface works.
Tutorial Part 1: Easily Setting Up One Image Ad
Tutorial Part 2: Setting Up a Group of Rotating Ads
Overall, I think AdRotate is a great plugin and easy to use if you can ignore all the extra options you don’t need. A way to hide the extra options in the admin would be nice, but again, I completely understand why the developer wants to show those.
Rob Cioffi says
The videos are set to private. 🙁
Laura Hartwig says
So sorry. YouTube suddenly switched all my videos to private. I have switched these back to public and am changing the others now. Thanks for letting me know!
Sidney Sunshine says
Hi! I’m trying to figure out how to have certain ads show on the same spot on different pages. i.e. If I have a feet ad in my header on the home page. How do you I have a hands ad in my header for the FAQ page?
Laura Hartwig says
Hi Sidney,
I assume since you are seeing different ads, you are using the Google AdSense or other ads and not self-hosted ads? AdSense has it’s own way of deciding what ads to show – not related to the plugin. It takes it’s cue from text on the page as well as other general data about the site. In your AdSense settings, you can allow or block certain ads if you don’t like what you’re seeing, but in general, Google has to decide what ads to serve also based on the advertiser’s budget and preferences. Even simply refreshing the page could show you a different ad depending on how many times the ad has already been shown that day, etc. It it a pretty sophisticated but complicated system.
Sidney Sunshine says
Thanks Laura! I was actually thinking of self-hosted ads
Laura Hartwig says
Are you using rotating ads? Perhaps only set one ad for that area if you only want to see one? Hard to say without seeing your backend setup.
JC says
For questions about AdRotatePlugin there is support at: http://www.adrotateplugin.com/support/
Tony says
I agree with you, that too much extra options are confusing for beginners, but if you want to optimize the performance of your ads seriously, you need a plugin which provides you an exact controll about who gets where which ad to see. I worked with WPads, Simple Ads Manager and AdRotate for years, until I found Advanced Ads (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-ads/). This is in my honest opinion the best tool for advertisers.
Laura Hartwig says
Thanks for the info!