So whenever you write something called “the best _ plugin” you know of course that’s going to change over time. And it has with ad management plugins for WordPress. Since I originally wrote this post back in May of 2008 the WPAds plugin has become outdated and nearly non-existent. Since then the WordPress plugin developer Ozh has developed the Ozh’ Who Sees Ads plugin which is now in my opinion the best choice for an ad management plugin. If you are starting a new blog or just improving a current one, this is a plugin that can help you monetize your efforts.

Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.

For instance, you could consider the following criteria: Is the visitor a regular reader? Does this visitor come from a search engine? Is the visitor currently reading an old post, or something fresh? This plugin allows for easily creating display rules with a very advanced user interface. Here’s a screenshot of this plugin in action:

< — UPDATED 09/25/2010 — >

After hours and hours of searching I came back to the answer I found almost 2 years ago. That is that WPAds is by far the best open source Ad Manager plugin for WordPress. For some reason I forgot about the plugin, and I was in need of an Ad Management plugin for this very blog. After installing nearly 6 different plugins, this one had everything I needed, and of course it’s compatible with the newest version of WordPress. Here’ s a screenshot of the plugin in action in the back end of WordPress:

This screenshot is what you see when you create a new ad. What you do is give it a title, input your code from our ad, then give the ad a zone. That zone is what is used in the PHP code the plugin then gives you to input into your template. What this means is that you can create as many ads as you want to the same zone! Allowing for the randomizing of ads in once place! You can set the ad to have a maximum amount of views if you want to, and also give the ad a weight above or below any other ads on that same zone.

The screenshot above shows you the reporting of the views served for each individual ad. This would be known as “Impressions” for you PPC addicts. The plugin is easy to install, easy to setup, and easy to manage. I highly recommend it for ad management for any WordPress blog!