Getting Adsense into your posts isn’t difficult - it is just a bit time consuming. In addition to taking time for each instance of the ads you want to show, there is a concern that readers have become ‘Ad Blind’, and so showing the same format of ads may be less effective (in click thru terms) than previously.
This plugin from BIGGNUTS allows Google ads to be included into your posts, and it will even randomise the type of ad (size and placement) to try and avoid the ad blindness that some people believe is happening.
Installation is identical to the vast majority of good plugins (just upload the files and then activate from the control menu). Once activated it is simply a case of going to (in WP 2.5) Settings > Adsense to gain access to the wide range of settings.
First up is instructions to get a Google Adsense account (which I guess is important if you didn’t realise that you needed one - or you could always use my publisher code!). The drop down below this then allows you to choose from Google, Yahoo or a random combination of both types of ads. Now this is very interesting to anyone that really buys into the ad blindness belief. Essentially, I can now choose to randomise even the source of the ads that are appearing in my posts.
Once I have chosen my ad network I then enter the account information for each network, making sure that any ads that get clicked on get credited to me.
Then there is a checkbox list with a choice of no less than nine different ad formats that I can select to randomise into my posts (it should be noted that all of these sizes show text/link based ads from the Google network, so you are not going to see image based ads here this isn’t accurate).
Next up is the opportunity to control the appearance (colours, borders, backgrounds etc) of the ads that you are placing in your posts. This controls the appearance of all the ads (regardless of size) so don’t expect to be able to randomise colours as well as sizes and placements!
Moving on we then have an option to decide just how many ads and ad units we want to place in our post and then a drop down for the placement in the post (center, left, right, random).
Then there is a checkbox list allowing us to exclude certain pages from getting ads (I exclude my homepage for example).
Finally, there are three EXTREMELY useful options.
- The first allows us to show ads only to us as the blog author. This is very useful if you want to test the combination of the settings you have chosen before using it in your live blog (you MUST remember to turn this off when you want to go live again - forget and you will think all is well, but only you are seeing ads!)
- Next is an option to prevent you from ever seeing ads. This can be useful I guess, but I think it is a little pointless myself - I want to see what my readers see
- Which is where the last option comes into play. You can tell Google via the use of their google_adtest=”on”
switch that your views are not to be counted in the stats. Some of you may not be aware that Google pays different rates to those that carry Adsense dependent upon their CPM rates. The better your rates are then the more Google pays you. By being able to exclude your views from these stats you will maximise your CPM rates and so the amount you will get paid!
Last two statements are just controls for when and where the Adsense Injection plugin will be used if you want to override the settings in particular instances.
This plugin is very good. It is well written, has a ton of options and works. However, there are a few points that are not quite as you would hope:
- Ad units will often obscure parts or all of an image (there seems to be some <div> alignment issues)
- If you allow this to be a truly random placement then be prepared for there to be frequent very odd looking text displays in your posts. The ads will be placed in a random manner - so this will often result in very narrow columns between images that you have placed in the post and the ad unit that this plugin places - this results in difficult to read text at times.
- Using <!–noadsense–> means that you will not see ANY ads in that post - you cannot use it to define a section of a post that should not have ads - this means it is an all or nothing decision.
- DAX (the plugin author) seems to be a fairly irreverrent chap - so expect to see swearing and a total disrespect for anything in his language and blog.
With this understood all it takes is a bit of time and playing to get the optimum placement and combinations for your blog and post style and then you can forget about it!
Nicely done, very good plugin
I have run out of coffee - fancy buying me one? Tags: access, account, addition, adsense, Anyone, appearance, BIGGNUTS, bit, blindness, blog, case, checkbox, code, combination, concern, consuming, control, CPM, drop, format, google, image, information, Injection, installation, instance, majority, menu, network, option, placement, plugin, post, publisher, randomise, range, realise, size, source, thru, type, upload, use
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