AdSense Plugin WP QUADS (Free or €49+)
AdSense Plugin is probably the simplest integration of Google AdSense in your WordPress site. With the free version of the plugin, you can display ads in multiple regions in your WordPress site including:
- Sidebar widgets
- Beginning, middle and end of post
- After the “more” tag,
- After images in posts
To display the ad, simply paste the Google AdSense code snippet in the widget. You can also insert ads between any paragraphs in a post using the <!–Ads1–> <!–Ads2–> snippets.
Fun fact: This plugin is a reboot of the famous Quick AdSense plugin, which was last updated four years ago and still has over 1,000,000 active installations.
The premium version of the plugin WP QUADS Pro includes additional cool features such as:
- AMP Ads that displays ads in AMP versions of your pages (check out our guide on getting started with AMP in WordPress)
- Responsive Ads – so that the ads look pixel-perfect in phones, tablets and desktops.
- Visibility Conditions – which enables your to selectively display ads in either mobile, tablet or desktop, or a combination of them.
Pricing starts at 49 EUR per for a single-site license and comes with a 30-day refund window, making it a good choice for affiliate marketers and bloggers alike.
WordPress Ad Widget (Free)
WordPress Ad Widget s a seriously simple plugin that enables you to display both Google Ads and custom ads in your WordPress site. If you were to sell ad-spots in your site, you could offer a variety of options to your customers. How? With over 55 ad-formats you can advertise Facebook pages, Instagram profiles and many more.
Sam Pro (Free Edition)
The Sam Pro Free Edition displays ads with banner rotation. Which means that the plugin cherry-picks an ad from a bunch of ads and displays them in your site. The cherry-picking is however, based on a flexible logic which calculates ad weight (or priority) and predefined restrictions. With predefined restrictions, you can selectively display ads in particular pages, posts, categories, custom post types, etc. You can also schedule the and limit the display of ads based on number of impressions of clicks.
The premium add-ons include pop-ups and fly-in ads, and geo-targeting. Personally, I would not use pop-up ads or fly-ins unless it’s a newsletter signup box, preferably with a free e-book or similar offer.
AdRotate (Free)
AdRotate makes ad management easy. You can display your own adverts or from third party networks such as Google AdSense, DoubleClick, etc. AdRotate enables periodic scheduling of ads and accurately calculates clicks/impressions and displays the top performing ads in your site.
The premium version includes cool features such as geo-targeting, ad-blocker detection and others tools which enable you to easily sell and manage multiple ad campaigns. Pricing starts at 29 EUR for a single site license and comes with a premium support.
WP Bannerize Pro (Free)
If most of your custom advertising is done via non-Adobe Flash banners, WP Bannerize Pro might be your answer. The plugin creates a custom post type called “Banners”. This enables you to create banners like you would create a post or a page.
To create a banner, you first upload/import the banner image and select if you want to track the impressions and CTR and then publish the banner. Once done, a banner shortcode is generated. Now you can display the banner in any post, page or widgetized area using the shortcode.
Additional features include geo-targeting, IP restrictions, role-based ad targeting, and a fully stacked analytics dashboard.
WP Advertize It (Free)
WP Advertize It is your standard ad management plugin that enables you to display third-party ads from Google AdSense, as well as self-served ads. You can choose from over 10 places to display your ads, including sidebar widgets. Moreover, the plugin also enables you to disable ads in particular post types, tags, IP addresses, post authors, etc.
Advanced Ads (Free / €29)
Advanced Ads is your go-to ad-management plugin with tons of useful features ranging from basic ad creation, to displaying third-party ads, to geo-targeted, highly customizable ad-network. With Advanced Ads, you can build, display, configure, filter and target ads based on your visitors.
A full description for the free features in available in the plugin’s WordPress repository page – I suggest you give it a quick read before moving to the next plugin on this list.
Advanced Ads also has a range of premium add-ons available such as Selling Ads, which helps you sell ad-spots in your site. The premium version allows essential features such as advanced aj-injection, innovative ad-placement areas such as side header, or floating ads and many more.
Pricing for a premium copy of the plugin start at €29 EUR for Advanced Ads Pro (single site license) or €69 EUR for the Advanced Ads Bundle, which includes all add-ons and future updates.
AWPCP – Classifieds Plugin (Free)
Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is your classic plugin designed to run a feature-rich online classifieds page from your WordPress website. Classifieds can be made searchable by, state, country, username, or keyword. On top of this, you can display ads from Google AdSense. Take a look at the full list of features for running your WordPress-powered classifieds page.
A number of premium modules such as Authorize.net and PayPal payment gateway integration, campaign manager and coupons module, amongst others can come in very handy for running a rich classifieds website.
Advanced Advertising System (Free or $29+)
Advanced Advertising System is a relatively new plugin with 1,000+ active installations. The plugin supports multiple ad-spots, ad-rotation and campaign scheduling and budget threshold, amongst other features. You can sell ads based on CPM, CPC and CPP. The premium version of the plugin supports filterable campaigns, an AJAX loader, advanced scheduling and beautiful charts in analytics and statistics section.
WP PRO Advertising System – All In One Ad Manager ($29)
WP PRO Advertising System is one of the most popular premium WordPress advertising plugins in CodeCanyon clocking over 5,500 sales till date. It has 18 predefined layout options, campaign manager, banner creator and advanced analytics and reporting. You can display background ads, popup ads, fly-in ads, responsive ads and display ads in your MailChimp newsletters. Moreover, this plugin also detects and prevents adblockers. The plugin supports third-party integration such as as WooCommerce and BuySellAds via paid add-ons.
Ad Inserter (Free)
The great thing about Ad Inserter is that it enables you to insert ads at any point in your post. The free version of the plugin allows you to insert up to 16 code blocks (read ad blocks) and supports conditional display logic, i.e. you can filter out post types, tags, categories and viewports from displaying your ads.
And guess what? Ad Inserter is officially endorsed by Amazon to add Native Shopping Ads to WordPress posts. Ad Inserter Pro starts at $20 (for a double site license) which enables you to display geo-targeted ads and supports IP blacklisting, amongst other useful features.
WP-Insert (Free)
P-Insert is by far, one of the best free ad-management plugins out there. Similar to most plugins in this category, WP-Insert supports multiple ad-networks such as Google AdSense, Clickbank, etc. However, unlike other plugins, it offers free geo-targeting, which means that you can display AdSense ads to visitors from US and Clickbank ads to UK visitors. Other cool features includes Google Analytics integration, displaying of legal notices, ad split-testing and dynamic ad-placement in the middle of any article.
Corner Ad (Free)
Corner Ad is a simple ad-management plugin that displays an ad in the top left (or right) your WordPress site. It’s designed to be minimally invasive in order to prevent a bad user experience. When a user hovers over the ad, it flips open and displays the ad in the full viewport. As soon as the mouse is removed, the ad returns to its former self. You can use this plugin to display important announcements, upcoming promotions or run a “secret-sale”.
Meks Easy Ads Widget (Free)
Meks Easy Ads Widget is a simple plugin that enables you to display unlimited ads in a widget. You can select limit number of ads per view, rotate ads and randomize the ad display order. You can also define your own custom size or choose from a number of predefined (and standardized) ad sizes.
Google AdSense (Free)
Google AdSense by BestWebSoft is another entry in the pro-AdSense plugin party with the ability to directly import ads from your AdSense account and displaying them in multiple regions of your site, including before/after posts, pages and sidebar widgets.
Ads Pro Plugin – Multi-Purpose WordPress Advertising Manager ($37)
Ads Pro Plugin – Multi-Purpose WordPress Advertising Manager is the second most sold ad-management WordPress plugin in CodeCanyon with over 2,600 sales. Simply put, it helps manage your ads in your WordPress site. The plugin supports filterable ads based on categories, tags and devices. It can be configured to display ads only after visitors have spent a particular amount of time on the site and restrict the number of times ads are shown to a user per session. Finally it has geo-targeted ads with 20 different display styles that can be placed over 25 different placements.
In case you wanted to create a self-serving ad-platform, the plugin allows you to sell three different billing models – CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and CPD (cost per day). Supported payment gateways include Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, and Bank Transfer.
Aparg SmartAd – WordPress Ad Management Plugin ($30)
Aparg SmartAd is another strong contender in the ad-management plugin space. Noteable features include 75+ popup and embed animations, 25 ad placement regions, and 5 supported ad types including image, video, Flash, code and iFrame. Similar to most plugins, this supports ad-rotation and advanced filtering options based on tags, categories, etc. Additionally, it also supports filtering based on language. (Supported multilingual plugins include WPML and qTranslate).
The plugin also supports three campaign types – background ads, popup ads and embed ads. And it ships with an advanced stats dashboard. The PDF export feature comes pretty handy when sharing reports with your ad-spot buyers. You can schedule ads and configure auto-suspension of ads based on date, views and clicks.
AdPlugg (Free or $10+)
AdPlugg is a relatively new plugin that integrates the AdPlugg ad-management service into WordPress. Think of AdPlugg as an online SaaS ad-management platform. You can configure and schedule multiple ads, setup ad and banner rotation, track clicks and other stats -for all your sites – from a centralized dashboard. If you own multiple websites (running on WordPress or other content management solutions), AdPlugg can display ads in those platforms too via their respective plugins!
The plugin is free till 100,000 impressions per month and supports only image ads. Paid plans start at $10/month and supports multiple ad-types including video, interstitial, third-party ads (Google AdSense, etc.) and more.
Advanced Tools
The following tools solve very specific challenges, that appear for very specific marketing campaigns.
WordPress Dynamic Keyword Insertion ($21)
If you’re running AdWords campaigns with Dynamic Keywords then this one is for you. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Google AdWords lets you replace specific portions of your ad’s text with the search keyword used.
For example, let’s say you’re running an ad with the keywords leather iphone cases. If someone searches for red leather iphone cases, your ad would show up if you’ve kept your ad in medium match. Now, with Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Google would modify your ad by adding or replacing the ad’s copy, with the searched keyword. In our example, the word red would be dynamically inserted in the ad’s text.
Imagine the same thing with your landing page. If a visitor arrives at your landing page from a specific search keyword, the WordPress Dynamic Keyword Insertion plugin would change the landing page copy dynamically to include the same keyword.
How can this be used in Ad Management?
If you’re selling an CPA based ads in your site, getting hyper-targeted clicks from Google AdWords improve your chances of conversion.
Adverts Detector Ultimate for WordPress ($12)
Simply put, the Adverts Detector Ultimate plugin enables you to show or hide content on your site depending on where the user came from. Detectable sources include search engines such as Google and Yandex; ad-networks such as Google Ads and Yandex Ads; and social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc.
Now with this plugin, you can show a different page for your Facebook fans and another for your Pinterest followers.
Honourable Mentions
Following are three free ad-management plugins we feel are “just right”. They’re built to solve one purpose, and they do it well. Our primary reason to place them under honourable mentions is: (a) they were last updated over a year ago and (b) they have a high active installations count at the time of writing this article.
- WP125 – A free plugin with 40,000 active installations that displays only 125×125 px ads, tracks clicks and supports ad expiry. I think it’s the implicit simplicity that makes this plugin so popular even if it was last updated over a year ago.
- AdInjection – Currently at 30,000+ active installations, this plugin displays or “injects” ads into multiple regions of a post or page. It supports ad-rotation, A/B testing and has filterable options including IP address, referrer and post age. However, this plugin was last updated over a year ago.
- Insert Post Ads – A very simple yet effective plugin from the WPBeginner team, it simply inserts your Google AdSense ads in between paragraphs in your posts and pages.