One of the best way to monetize a site’s content is by placing nice performing Google Adsense ads. Placement of the ads plays an important role in overall earning from the program. One can easily copy the Adsense ad code or tag from Adsense dashboard and paste the same in site’s HTML source. If your site is running on WordPress CMS, you may edit the installed theme’s file or paste the ad tag in text widget of Widget area under appearance section. Few premium themes offer ad placement from theme’s settings page as well. But to make this process even easier, Google released a WordPress plugin and it works really well.
Google Publisher Plugin (beta) is a WordPress plugin to insert Adsense ads at multiple location without much effort. It also allows you to do one click verification with Google’s Webmaster Tool. As I am already using Google Adsense on Internet Techies, I tried this plugin on a new site. Here is how the plugin performed.
1. Easy install and activation (thanks to WordPress)
Installation is as easy as any other plugin hosted on WordPress repository. You just need to search for the term ‘Google Publisher Plugin’ on plugins dashboard (under new plugin). Click on the ‘Install now’ button and from there you can install the plugin without much effort.
2. Settings » Google Publisher Plugin
The settings page of this plugin appears under default “Settings” menu of WordPress. Once you open the plugin’s settings page, it asks to verify or add the website with a Google Account. Remember that you have to verify or add the same Google Account that you like to use for Adsense or having a verified Adsense account. Once you login with your Google account and perform the verification process, it comes back to your own site’s plugin page.
PS – Site should be online for the verification. If you are testing this plugin on localhost, the verification process will not complete.
3. One Click Webmaster Tool verification
Once the verification with Google account is done, the site will automatically verify for Webmaster Tool. With a verified site on Webmaster Tool, you can browse the site’s crawled content and also include a XML file to let Google crawl your site properly. There are so many other information and tools available under Google Webmaster Tool to improve the performance of your site on Google’s search engine.
4. Manage Adsense Ads
The most important purpose of this plugin is to let you insert Adsense ads at different locations on your site. Click on the ‘Manage’ button to open a preview page where you can insert the ads. Google’s plugin analyses the site’s page and then let you know some optimized and available locations where you can insert ads at single click. Wherever you are seeing a maps like symbol with + sign, you can insert adsense ads over there by just clicking on that symbol. For example, if the preview page is showing + symbol just below the post title, and you want to place an ad over there, click on the symbol.
Now you can see a new option window to select or change the type of ad. That’s it, now you can open the page in a new window and see the inserted ad running.
Note – Newly created Adsense ad takes around 10 minutes o appear for the first time, so be patient.
The Manage Adsense Ad window allows to insert ads on site’s front page, single post, single page, category and archive. You can choose the type of page where you want to insert the ad from the drop-down available in top-left corner of the manage Adsense window.
How to Customize the Inserted Ads
All the inserted ads through Google Publisher Plugin appears as ‘New’ under status on Adsense dashboard » My ads. You can click on the ad name and change the colors (title, description, link) with your choice. You can also associate these ads with existing or new ad channels.
I find this plugin very helpful for those who are not comfortable with editing the theme’s file. But I would also like to see the plugin showing existing ad as an option to insert inside a new site.
Other plugins to Insert Adsense Ads at Optimized Places
Some of the recommended WordPress plugins to manage Adsense or other network ads are Quick Adsense, AdRotate, Google Ads Master.