For some reason the best advert management plugin for WordPress is no longer supported. Quick Adsense is dead, the adverts simply do not appear any more. It seems that the original plugin developer sold it to another party but they have not updated it Рthey also do not respond to enquiries.
Now, the plugin actually stopped working a while ago as it is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. I decided to get around this snag by not updating the WordPress core files. Risky maybe, but not so risky as having no way to display adverts within the content on my site. It all went wrong last night when I decided to update some other plugins though.
Showing Adverts Within Wordress Posts
See, this is what Quick Adsense did so well. The name was misleading, you could place any code in the fields to be displayed. Then for each piece of code you set where abouts within posts (and Pages) it appears, e.g. before the content, centre of the content, after the content, after Nth paragraph, after an image, after the “more tag” etc. etc. You could display up to 12 (I think) adverts on a page too.
Optimising Adverts / Adsense
A side note – I have been using Adsense for years and have tried just about every placement you can think of, with every ad format. By far the best is always to have 2 adverts within the content. Adsense ads in side bars suffer from serious banner blindness issues, above the content causes “Page Layout” Google search penalties. In the content works best. Not too soon, after a few paragraphs.
Quick Adsense Alternatives
So, as I said, I was careful not to update WordPress. However, last night I did update something (possibly the WordPress SEO plugin, maybe something else) and that broke Quick Adsense. I only noticed this morning so lost half and American day’s revenue (the Brits were all asleep or in the pub so did not affect them so much).
I had searched around for some alternatives before but none seemed to work. Ad Injection was tested but it killed the whole site (some sort of php error appeared instead of the website).
Finally I found half a solution, so had to add a workaround to make it a full solution.
Ad Inserter (version 1.2.0)
Ad Inserter inserts adverts into Posts. For some reason it does not insert into Pages. Not a big problem as I only run a few Pages instead of posts. It was developed by Igor Funa and can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ad-inserter/.
His description:
“Integrate any HTML code into WordPress. Just paste the code and select the location and display mode. Perfect for AdSense or contextual Amazon ads.”
It does what it says on the tin.
However, for strange, historic reasons, some of my most popular pages are Pages and not Posts. So they were still without adverts. So another solution was needed.
Just spotted one issue – it inserts Adverts into blockquote areas. Annoying to say the least! Oh well. I think I will be doing a lot of manual checks and hopefully fixing on a Post level.
Global Content Blocks
Global Content Blocks is a plugin which lets you create and manage shortcodes in WordPress. Shortcodes call up more complex code so it is easier and add HTML to a post (or Page!) and easy to edit it. Global Content Blocks was developed by benz1 and can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/global-content-blocks/
So I created 3 shortcodes for my 3 adverts and added them manually to the Pages that needed adverts.
Now, I probably could just put the shortcodes into Ad Inserter РI only just thought of this. This would mean that all the adverts are managed via Global Content Blocks. I may try this on another site. For now, I have adverts again. Phew.
I have not had time to scrutinize these plugins, I cannot see anything “odd” happening, so for now am trusting that nothing untoward happens while my back is turned.
Ideally someone will fix Quick Adsense or build a new plugin to properly manage adverts. Ideally someone at Google / DoubleClick for Publishers will build a WordPress plugin to manage it – most publishers use WordPress don’t they?
