If you want to run banner ads on your self-hosted WordPress blog, you have a number of hurdles you need to overcome. And if you aren’t very HTML or PHP savvy, then it’s even a little more challenging.
I use OpenAds to run the ads on Sparkplugging.com. It is a full-featured ad server that displays ads, manages impressions, rotates advertisers, and tracks every channel on the site separately – all from one place. I can also run ads on other domains from the same application. But to say its “easy” wouldn’t exactly be truthful. It’s not ‘hard’, but it’s also not intuitive, it’s cumbersome when you have a lot of channels or inventory to track, and their help files leave a lot to be desired.
That being said, OpenAds can be a bit of overkill for most bloggers who don’t need this level of tracking and inventory management.
So I was pleased to see this new WordPress plugin get launched today, MaxBlogPress Banner Ads by Pawan Agrawal at MaxBlogPress. While it is not a fully-functional adserver, it is a pretty slick-looking plugin that makes it quite simple to put banner ads on your site.
Here’s a video preview of the plugin in action. (It’s not really NSFW only because of the rather loud and constant dance music in the background, so mute before you hit play.)
Some MaxBlogPress Banner Ads features:
- Tracks impressions, clicks & CTR
- Rotates banners in any one ad spot
- It will even randomize where your ads appear to help combat ad blindnes
- Inserts banners without having to edit your template code, and even offers some surprisingly advanced level fine-tuning as to where the ads appear.
Setting up ad zones
Has more precise control features for more experienced WordPress users
MaxBlogPress Inventory Management and Rotation I obviously haven’t been able to give this plugin a test run, but I’d love to hear from any of you who use it. I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the level of control it offers, and to not have to mess with your templates is a huge plus.
My remaining questions would be whether it’s been tested under Digg conditions, if it can mail reports to advertisers, if you can track/predict inventory, and if you can assign costs/earnings to ad units. Most of those are not necessities, but I know from experience that ad-serving can be a resource hog, and under high-traffic I’d had to turn them off to keep from getting shut down (in a shared hosting environment, not on a dedicated server)
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