We’ve added a new AdPlugg Network Stats Dashboard! You can now view your AdPlugg Network Stats, including impressions and estimated revenue, by logging in to your AdPlugg account and going to Analytics and then AdPlugg Network Stats.
Estimated Revenue
From the new dashboard you can now view your estimated revenue. While not yet finalized, this should give you a good idea of how much you are earning by serving AdPlugg Network Ads.
Impressions
In addition to Estimated Revenue, you can also toggle the displayed metric to show your Impressions. The Impressions metric shows the number of AdPlugg Network ads that you served. Checking in on this metric can help you ensure that your ads are serving and that you are seeing positive trends in the quantity of Network ads that you are serving.
Updated Daily
Stats on the new dashboard are updated daily. Whereas previously, you would have to wait until you received your earnings report via email (near the end of the month), you can now check in on how your ads are doing and see stats that are updated within the last 24 hours.
View by Day, Month or Year
Similar to how the regular AdPlugg Charts interface works, with the new AdPlugg Network Dashboard, you can toggle between Day, Month and Year mode. This allows you to see trends in your revenue and impressions for various timeframes to better chart your progress and performance on the network.
In addition to switching the interval, you can also set the date range that is shown. The default will show you the last 6 months but simply change the Start Date and End Date to see the dates that you are interested in reviewing.
Available to All AdPlugg Network Publishers
The new feature is available immediately to all AdPlugg Network publishers. You can access it from the Analytics tab.
If you are new to the AdPlugg Network or haven’t started serving AdPlugg Network ads yet, you can still view the dashboard to check it out. Once you start serving AdPlugg Network ads, check back and your impressions and estimated revenue will begin showing.
Enroll in the AdPlugg Network!
Not part of the AdPlugg Network yet? It’s free, you can turn it on and off as needed, and it is a great way to earn extra money. Enroll today and try it out!
We just launched ad.new! At ad.new, anyone can create a new ad, instantly!
The .new TDL (Top Level Domain) is a new program from Google and an entirely new way of thinking about domains. With the .new TDL, just go to someaction.new and get started right away! Want to make a dinner reservation? Go to reservation.new (OpenTable). Want to write a blog post? Go to post.new (Automattic/WordPress). Want to create a new ad? Go to ad.new (AdPlugg)!
ad.new can be used by existing or new AdPlugg users. To use, go to ad.new and instantly create an ad. Give the ad a name, a click through URL and an image. If you are already logged in, that’s all that there is to it. If you aren’t logged in, there is a spot for you to enter your existing (or new) username and password right there on the form.
After you press the save button, you are immediately given access to ad tags (code snippets) for running the ad. To run the ad: simply paste the ad tag into your own website, give it to a third party publisher, submit it to an ad network, etc.
If you want to find out how your ad is doing, just open your dashboard at adplugg.com. There you can make changes and view stats such as impressions and clicks.
We are really excited about ad.new and hope that you will love it too. It’s totally free so give it a try and let us know what you think! We think that it will make digital advertising a lot more accessible to the average internet user.
Have ideas for what we could do to make ad.new better? Please post them in the comments section below.
Access to the AdPlugg Network is now available to all publishers!
Are you looking to monetize your website but don’t have any advertisers? The AdPlugg Network is a new service from AdPlugg that allows you to easily place network ads on your site and earn real revenue by displaying network ads.
Once enrolled in the program, you will have access to a special ad format in your system named “AdPlugg Network”. You can target this ad to your zones, rotate it in with other ads, use it when you don’t have any other ads to show, target it to certain geographic regions, etc.
Every month, you will get paid by AdPlugg based on the number of AdPlugg Network impressions that you register. You can track your AdPlugg Network impressions from the Analytics interface within the system. July 2021 Update: Payments are generally made monthly but may vary depending on when payment is received from the ad exchange.
The program is open to all publishers regardless of where you are located and payments are currently made via PayPal on net-45 terms. July 2021 Update: payments are now made on anywhere from net-21 to net-90 day terms depending on the terms of the ad exchange where the impression was sold.
It’s free to enroll and you can remain in the program whether or not you are currently serving network ads. So signing up to have the option available is a no brainer.
The AdPlugg Network ads come from various advertisers, agencies and ad exchanges that AdPlugg works with. You have complete control over where and when the network ads show.
If you are just now looking to monetize your site, have some empty spots to fill or are looking to boost your revenues, the AdPlugg Network is a great option. It’s super easy to enroll, just click your username in the top right and under Account Settings, click Enroll in AdPlugg Network.
If you have any questions about the AdPlugg Network or how to enroll, please post them to the comments section below.
July 2021 Update: We’ve updated the above post with new information regarding the AdPlugg Network’s payment terms.
Looking to place ads on your Without Code site? Do it with AdPlugg!
Without Code
Without Code (also known as WOCode) is a popular online website builder and hosting service. You can create an account at www.wocode.com and instantly start creating your site.
Without Code is similar to other hosted website builders such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and WordPress.com.
AdPlugg
Same as with these other site builders, AdPlugg works great for serving ads to your Without Code site. Simply install the AdPlugg SDK into your Without Code HTML Header and then drop AdPlugg Ad Tags (special <div> tags) anywhere that you want ads to appear on your Without Code site.
Once you’ve done that, you have the full power of the AdPlugg service to target ads to certain pages or locations on the page (header, footer, etc), schedule ads, rotate ads, track impressions and clicks, etc. The ads can come from any source including direct sold, ad networks, affiliate networks, in-house, etc.
We’ve posted some detailed instructions for how to set up Without Code with AdPlugg into a new section of the AdPlugg Cookbook. You can view it here:
In summary, it is easy to use AdPlugg to set up, manage, serve and track your Without Code ads. Without Code ads will work with any of the AdPlugg plans from Free to Business. Try it out today – it only takes a couple of minutes to set up.
If you don’t already have an AdPlugg account, you can create one here. If you don’t already have a Without Code account, you can create one here.
If you have any questions, suggestions, etc.; please post them to the comment section below.
We just added new controls for intelligent ad rotation! These controls work with AdPlugg’s timed rotate feature.
As many of you know, you can set a Rotation Interval on your AdPlugg Placements (and have your ads rotate on a timer – at the interval of your choice). See our blog post from 2015 announcing the timed rotate feature. As many of you have also found out, this can get quite expensive as ads may rotate for quite a long time.
We’ve been working on how to address this issue: to allow you to rotate your ads on a timer but to do it in a sane way. We are calling our solution “Intelligent Ad Rotation”. There are now two new controls on the Placement form to facilitate the new solution.
Viewability Timeout
The first new control is labeled “Pause Timed Rotation When Not Viewable?”. As can be inferred by the name, when enabled, this control will stop your ads from rotating when the ad Zone is not within view. We use the MRC (Media Rating Council) standard that recommends that 51% of the ad should be within view for the ad to be considered viewable. So if the user scrolls to a location on the page where the ad is no longer visible, the ad will stop rotating.
Note that this feature is enabled by default on all new Placements. If you want to use this feature with your existing Placements, you will need to edit them and turn this feature on.
Inactivity Timeout
The second control is labeled “Timed Rotation Inactivity Timeout”. This control allows you to set the number of seconds of inactivity to allow before the rotation times out. The default is 5 seconds. So with this field set to 5 seconds, if the user stops interacting with the page (scrolling, clicking, etc) for more than 5 seconds, the ad rotation will be paused. If the user starts, interacting with the page again, rotation will resume.
To test the inactivity timeout on the demo page, stop touching your mouse and keyboard. After 5 seconds, the ads will stop rotating. Move your mouse and the ads will start rotating again.
To test the viewability timeout, scroll down until just a small part of the ad is visible, the ads will stop rotating. Scroll back up so that the ad is within view and the ads will start rotating again.
Should I Use It?
Yes, the new controls are available for all plans and it is recommended that every publisher (who wants to rotate their ads on a timer) use both of these features.
The features ensure that you aren’t registering impressions for ads that no-one is looking at. This is obviously a more fair way to calculate impressions for your advertisers but is also likely to lower your own AdPlugg bill.
Really the only time that you wouldn’t want to use these features is for sites that might be used in a kiosk type setting or on sites that show long form videos.
Have Questions?
Have a question? Post it to the comments section below or feel free to contact us.
We just released a slew of new improvements to the AdPlugg Ad Manager. Here’s what’s new:
Ad archiving (All Plans)
Column visibility controls (All Plans)
Geotargeting column and filter (Business Plan)
Ad Groups filter (Business Plan)
Ad Archiving
Struggling with a long list of Ads – where many of them are old but you want to keep them for historical purposes? AdPlugg’s new Archive feature is here to help!
From the Ads list, there is a new “Archive” option under the Actions menu on the right. Choose Archive and you will be prompted to confirm moving the Ad to your archive. Once in your archive, the Ad will be removed from the Ads list as well as the list of ads in Charts and Reports. Note that the any stats from the ad will still be included in any totals.
To access your Ad archive, click the filter bar at the top of the Ads list and change the “Current” dropdown to Archive.
When viewing your archive, there is a new option under the Actions menu on the right titled “Restore”. Choose the “Restore” option and you will be prompted to confirm restoring the Ad from your archive. After you confirm the restore, the ad will be re-included in your Ads list, etc.
Note that any enabled Ads will be automatically disabled when moved to your archive.
The new Archive feature is available for all plans.
Column Visibility Controls
You can now control which columns you see from the various lists in the system. Want to see the Description field on your ads, turn on the column! Don’t use the Ad Order field? Turn the column off!
You can access the new Column visibility controls by clicking the Filter/Search/Options bar at the top of any lists (including Ads, Placements, Zones, etc).
The new Column Visibility Controls feature is available for all plans.
Geotargeting Column and Filter
Users of the AdPlugg Business Plan can now show a column for the locations that their Ads and Placements geotarget. We’ve also added a Geotargeting filter allowing you to filter the list based on the Geotargeting settings of the entries.
The Geotargeting column is turned off by default. Access the Filter/Search/Settings menu at the top of the Ads or Placements list and check the Geotargeting checkbox (under Columns). You will now be able to see the location that each entry targets.
Also in the Filter/Search/Settings menu is the new Geotargeting filter. Choose a location and the list will be filtered to show only entries that match the filter.
Ad Groups Filter
Want to view just the Ads that are a part of a particular Ad Group? You can do it with the new Ad Group filter for the Ads list!
In the Filter/Search/Settings menu at the top of the Ads list, there is a new Ad Groups dropdown. Just choose which Ad Group you want and the list of Ads will be filtered to only show ads that target that particular Ad Group.
Ad Groups and the new Ad Groups filter are available to users of the AdPlugg Business plan.
More Improvements?
Have ideas for additional improvements that we could make? More filters? More columns? Please post your ideas to the AdPlugg Feedback and Ideas Forum or let us know in the comments section below.
The AdPlugg Business Plan is now available! We’ve been working tirelessly to add the features that businesses need to maximize their ad efforts and today’s the day that it is all finally available for use.
The new package has all of the features of the Free and Pro plans plus:
Automated Report Emails
Geotargeting
Delivery Controls
Frequency Controls
Ad Groups and A/B Testing
In-Stream Ads
Email Ads
Here’s what each of these features do:
Automated Report Emails
The Automated Report Emails feature allows you to send emails with attached reports directly from your AdPlugg dashboard. You can send a one off email/report or you can schedule a report to be emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Geotargeting
The new Geotargeting feature allows you to target ads to specific geographic regions. So, for example you could target an ad for a New York City restaurant to only readers in New York, while serving network ads or ads for a national brand to everywhere else. The feature allows you to create multiple rules per ad and to create and combine inclusion and exclusion rules. You can geotarget individual ads or you can create a geotargeted placement to target multiple ads to the same geolocation.
Delivery Controls
Delivery controls allow you to serve a fixed number of impressions to a particular ad. For instance, you could set an ad to receive 10,000 ads per month. Once the 10,000 impressions have been served, the ad will switch off until the following month – at which point it will be allotted 10,000 more impressions.
When the impression cap is reached, the AdPlugg account administrator will receive an email notifying them. Likewise, they will receive an email when the ad is reenabled – either due to more impressions being added manually or impressions being added due to the start of a new month.
The Delivery Controls feature also includes a switch to enable/disable “pacing”. With pacing disabled, ad impressions will be served as fast as possible. On a busy site this could mean that an ad’s allotted impressions for the month are used up within a couple of days. If you enable the Pacing feature, the ad impressions will be programmatically spaced out so that some are served on each day of the month.
Frequency Controls
The Frequency Controls feature allows you to control how often an ad is shown to a particular reader. This feature is especially useful for ad formats such as slide-ins and popups.
AdPlugg’s dialog, slide-in, bar and interstitial formats receive some of the highest conversion rates and publishers can charge a premium to an advertiser to have their ads appear in one of these formats.
These formats however are also often perceived as intrusive or even annoying. Having them on every page can be a bit much so this feature allows you to optionally set your ads to appear just once per day for each individual user.
Ad Groups
Ad Groups allows you to group a bunch of similar ads together. For example you could create an ad with a red creative and another ad with a blue creative. You could then group the two ads together so that they receive equal time (combined) with the other ads in your header. You could then run a report to compare the CTR (Click Through Rate) of the two ads.
If an advertiser has a special running or a couple of products that they’d like to feature, you can facilitate by putting the ads into an Ad Group. If you have other advertisers who only have a single ad/creative, they will receive the same amount of time in the spot as the ads in the Ad Group collectively receive so that everything is fair and even.
In-Stream Ads
In-Stream Ads are ads that appear within video content. For example, say you have a cooking blog and you write a post about how to create the perfect Eggs Benedict. Using the regular display ads feature of AdPlugg, you could place an ad for your sponsors in the sidebar of your blog or within your text content.
Now, let’s say that you decide to create a video to go along with the post showing how to perfectly poach the egg. With the new In-Stream feature, you can have a video ad play before the video of how to poach the egg begins.
The in-steam ad can be any ad that you like. It could be an ad for one of your sponsors, an ad for your cookbook, your cooking classes, etc.
You can also optionally choose to make the ad “skippable”. With this feature, you control whether the ad requires completion or you can set it to allow the user to skip the ad after a predefined number of seconds.
You can choose to run specific ads for specific videos or you can rotate a set of ads within all of the video content on your site. This works the same as our existing display formats.
AdPlugg’s In-Stream ads feature will work with any video player. So whether you are using JW Player, BrightCove, etc. serve your video content; you can use AdPlugg to serve the ads.
Video ads fetch a premium and are a great way to make additional money on your site. So whether you already have video content or are thinking about adding it, you should consider monetizing it with in-stream ads.
Email Ads
AdPlugg’s new Email Ads feature allows you to include ads within your newsletters and other emails. As with all AdPlugg ads, the impression and any resultant click is recorded and can be reported on. AdPlugg’s email ads feature works with all email marketing system such as MailChimp and ConstantContact. To use, you simply copy the Email Ad Tag from your AdPlugg dashboard and paste it into your email marketing system.
Email ads are yet another way for you to realize additional revenue from the content that you generate. You can offer ad placement within your newsletter as part of an advertising package or charge for it a-la-carte. It’s up to you.
I also have to mention that email ads aren’t just for publishers. They are a great feature for advertisers or anyone with a newsletter (all businesses?). All businesses can use them to promote their products and services via their emails all while tracking conversions, click through rate, etc.
Pricing
The AdPlugg Business Plan has a base fee of $79 per month and our standard usage fees (which are the same for all plans).
Guarantee
As with all AdPlugg plans, the AdPlugg Business Plan comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. So feel to try it out at new risk for 30 days.
Introducing: Custom Plans
During the development of the Business Plan we realized that we weren’t going to be able to make a feature set that was perfect for all businesses. So in addition to the Business Plan we’ve now also made Custom Plans available.
Custom Plans allow you to choose one or a couple of these features and to receive a special rate.
If you only need, for example the In-stream Ads feature for your video site or the Automated Report Emails feature to better communicate with your advertisers, please contact us to get a quote for a Custom Plan.
Wrapping Things Up
We hope that you are as excited to use all of the new features of the Business Plan as we are to offer them to you. You can learn more about the AdPlugg Business Plan on the new AdPlugg Business Plan page.
We are also happy to get together with you for a screenshare session. During the online meeting, we can discuss how to best use the features of the Business Plan for your particular business or organization. If you are interested, just contact us and we’ll get something set up!
If you have any questions about any of these features or the Business Plan in general, please contact us or post them to the comments section below.
Want to place an ad on your Shopify site? Use AdPlugg! We’ve now fully tested AdPlugg with Shopify and we are happy to report that the two products integrate perfectly and work great together!
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms. The platform is used by over 600,000 merchants. In 2018, merchants sold more than $41 billion worth of merchandise (combined) on Shopify. Small shops to major brands (such as Budweiser and Tesla) use Shopify for their online stores.
While some of the big companies use Shopify only for the store portion of their site, Shopify is much more than that. Similar to other platforms (such as WordPress), you can use Shopify to create blog posts, pages (such as your about page) and more.
If you are running an online store, you should be doing content marketing by posting regularly to your blog. Putting up new blog content regularly is a great way to drive traffic to your site. But once that traffic gets to your site, you should be working to get the traffic to convert by promoting your products and services. If you can make a pitch within your post that is relavent to your topic, great! But no matter what your topic, you can always place ads for your own offerings in your sidebar, header, footer, etc. It is easy to do this when you add AdPlugg to your Shopify site.
Another common use for ads on an e-commerce website is for promoting the products of one vendor or manufacturer over another. Stores that move large volumes of say two brands of brake pads can often sell advertising to one of the manufacturers. This provides increased sales for that particular manufacturer and an additional revenue stream for the merchant.
We’ve made it easy to get set up using AdPlugg on your Shopify site. There is now a new Shopify section in the AdPlugg cookbook that teaches you how to do things such as:
These recipes can be used along with all of the rest of the AdPlugg features to allow you to schedule, rotate, track and run reports on the ads on your Shopify based site.
So whether you want to use advertising on your Shopify store to maximize your online store’s conversions, or generate ad revenue, AdPlugg’s got you covered.
Have questions? Want to see more Shopify cookbook recipes? Post in the comments section below.
AdPlugg is now fully compliant with the GDPR. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an EU law governing personal data and how it can be collected and stored.
Using AdPlugg For GDPR Compliant Ad Serving
AdPlugg is a great fit for serving ads under the GDPR. This is because AdPlugg doesn’t store Personal Information regarding the end users that the system serves ads to.
This is not true of some other advertising systems. Some ad systems have been pushing personalization. This is where you might see an ad for diapers on a car site because the ad system knows who you are and that you have a baby.
AdPlugg has taken a more contextual approach. With AdPlugg, a site about cars will typically show ads for cars, car parts, etc.
Which ad is shown is up to placement by the Publisher/Advertiser and not at all based on Personal Data.
Note: Under EU Law, you may still need a notice on your site notifying your users that your site uses cookies.
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers. Nothing on this website should be considered legal advice. Always consult with an attorney when making legal decisions.
GDPR and adplugg.com
To meet the requirements of the GDPR, we’ve made some changes to the adplugg.com website itself. These changes will be important to you, the user of the AdPlugg site and service.
New Legal Docs!
We’ve updated our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to include language relating to how we handle personal data under the GDPR.
We’ve also added a new Audience Privacy Policy that has information regarding the privacy of ad audience members (persons viewing an ad served from AdPlugg).
Please take a minute to review the changes and additions to our legal docs.
New Privacy Settings Screen!
From within the system, you can now access and control your privacy settings. To access the new settings, click your username in the top right and go to User Settings. Then click the Privacy Settings link.
New Cookie Preferences Feature!
You can now control how the adplugg.com site interacts with third party systems. For instance, you can disable analytical tracking to have us anonymize the data that we send to Google Analytics. You can also disable Advertising Cookies. This will turn off our integrations with our advertising partners such as Facebook and Twitter.
New Personal Data Export Feature!
You can now get an export of your Personal Data. To use the feature, go to your Privacy Setting (see above) and then click the Personal Data Export link.
New Personal Data Purge Feature!
No longer using AdPlugg? After you cancel your account, you can now have us purge all of your old data from our systems.
While the GDPR brings a lot of new regulations for online businesses, the rights of individuals to personal privacy are important. Using AdPlugg can allow you to maximize your marketing and advertising potential while respecting the privacy rights of your readers and ad audiences.
AdPlugg is now integrated with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and you can now use AdPlugg to easily serve any ad that you want into your AMP formatted pages. You can also use AdPlugg to schedule, rotate, and report on the ads that appear in your AMP pages.
What is AMP?
The AMP Project is an initiative led by Google to improve the mobile web.
Loading an entire web site via a mobile browser (on often a shoddy connection) can be a painful experience for the user, often resulting in high bounce rates if the page doesn’t load fast. AMP works to fix all of that by defining a simple page structure and set of tags for displaying a page quickly via a mobile browser.
The standard way to implement AMP is to have two page urls, one regular one and an AMP one. Mobile browsers are told to use the AMP version. Pages that adhere to the AMP standard often load almost twice as fast as a regular web page. This is due to a simplified structure, improved cachability and the elimination (or deferment) of slow loading resources.
AMP has strict standards regarding what can appear on an AMP page. This is one of the ways that it ensures fast load times. In order for an element to appear on an AMP page, it needs to be an officially approved AMP extension.
AdPlugg is now an official AMP extension and a provider of amp ads.
We’ve also integrated with the AMP WordPress plugin from Automattic to make it easy to place ads into your WordPress powered AMP pages.
Note: the instructions below are for WordPress users. If you aren’t using WordPress don’t fret, see the “Non-WordPress Sites” section below for how to drop tags into your AMP pages manually.
1. Install the AMP for WordPress Plugin
First you’ll want to install the AMP WordPress plugin from Automattic. This plugin will create an AMP page for all of your posts and pages. You can access the AMP page by going to http://www.example.com/some-post/amp.
2. Get Version 1.7 (or higher) of the AdPlugg WordPress Ad Plugin
In Version 1.7 of the AdPlugg WordPress Ad Plugin we’ve added the ability to insert ad tags into your AMP pages.
3. Configure Your AdPlugg Ads
If you don’t already have one, create an account at adplugg.com. Next, upload the ads that you want to include in your AMP pages. AdPlugg allows you to upload virtually any kind of ad that you want. This includes image ads, text ads, HTML5 ads, etc. I’d recommend that you create some AdPlugg Ad Zones that are specifically for your AMP ads. You could call them something like “amp-zone-1”, “amp-zone-2”, etc. Once you’ve created your Zones, target your ads to them directly or via an AdPlugg Placement.
4. Add the Ads to Your AMP Pages
The AdPlugg WordPress plugin makes it easy to add ads to your AMP pages by utilizing a system that you are probably already familiar with, the WordPress Widget System! Here’s what you do:
Log in to the WordPress administrator.
Click AdPlugg in the left menu and then click AMP to go to the new AdPlugg AMP settings page.
Check the “Automatic Placement” checkbox. This will enable the feature and create a new Widget Area called “AMP Ads”.
Go to Appearance and then Widgets. You should now be able to see the AMP Ads widget area.
Drag and drop the AdPlugg Widget into the Widget Area.
Configure the Widget by giving it a Zone machine name, width and height.
If you want the zone to repeat throughout the Page/Post, check the “default” checkbox to make the widget the default.
5. Check the Output
Check your AMP page or post at /your-post-name/amp – it should now include your AdPlugg ads! Feel free to add more ads, rotation, scheduling etc, from the settings available from your account at adplugg.com! Note: it’s best to limit each of your AMP Zones to only show one ad at a time (you can do this via the Max Ad Count field in the Zone settings).
That should do it, see the contextual help (in the top right of the WordPress Admin) for more details.
Non-WordPress Sites
If you aren’t using WordPress, it’s no big deal, instead of adding the tags via the AMP WordPress Plugin, you can just add them yourself (either manually or programmatically). Just drop a tag like the one below into your AMP page wherever you want your ad to appear:
Change the access code, zone names and sizes in the code above to match your account and requirements.
Simply drop this tag into your AMP page and your ads will appear wherever the tag is placed.
Conclusion
AdPlugg makes it easy to serve, manage and track your AMP ads. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions; please post them to the comments section below!
