House Ads in the official Ad Plugin

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

IF YOU ARE RUNNING AN AD BLOCKER RIGHT NOW YOU WILL HAVE A VERY BAD TIME TRYING TO SET THIS UP! TURN IT OFF BEFORE PROCEEDING DOWN THIS PATH! You’ve been warned.

Also be aware of browsers with built-in ad-blocker functionality (eg. Brave)

I’ve been working on adding support for house ads in the ad plugin and would like some feedback about how you’d use it. Here’s a video to demonstrate how I have it working now:

You define a set of ads using html and the usual theme support, and then add them to the ad placements that are currently available. If the ads or placement settings are changed, clients pick up the changes immediately. Placements with more than one ad will cycle through them evenly in order, starting with a random one.

Right now, house ads will always show instead of other configured ad networks. I’m not sure what the rules here should be.

Need help setting up the HTML for your ads? Check out the examples in the House Ads Templates collection!

House Ad Templates

IF YOU ARE RUNNING AN AD BLOCKER RIGHT NOW, YOU MAY HAVE A VERY BAD TIME TRYING TO SET THIS UP! TURN IT OFF BEFORE WORKING WITH AD RELATED CUSTOMIZATIONS! You’ve been warned. Also be aware of browsers with built-in ad-blocker functionality (eg. Brave) The Official Discourse Ad Plugin ships with a House Ad feature that allows you to create ads for your site using HTML and CSS. You can find the discussion for this feature at House Ads in the official Ad Plugin. The purpose …

[omarfilip]

The immediate benefit that comes to mind is (potential) avoidance of ad blockers and general privacy issues associated with network ads.

At the moment Google Ad Manager serves the purpose to show my house and directly sold ads and it fills in remaining inventory with AdSense ads.

Allotting a percentage for house ads in a mixed ad setup could complicate reporting in Google Ad Manager, I think.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

Yes DFP can definitely do it all, but as you say this feature shouldn’t be detectable by ad blockers. And I’ve already been trying to recommend DFP as the solution for serving house ads, but the answer is usually that DFP is too hard to understand.

[omarfilip]

Yes, this can definitely be the preferred method for anyone looking for a simpler ad serving solution.

[Pad_Pors]

just curious, is this the output of house ads?

it’s an interesting action from meta, your choices are inspiring and human-based . I hope the business goes forward strongly as always.

[Falco]

Yes, we are testing the new feature here on Meta for now so we can check for bugs.

[sat]

This will be a great plugin! thanks for making it. Here are my thoughts…

• It will be good if there is ad rotation for the same spot, in house ads. This will also help to promote sites important posts.
• Time based ads is also a good idea, 50% in house ads and 50% other type of ads.
• Provide option for text link, html ads and also banner ads? May be admin can upload banner and provide related link. This ads can run on posts only.

[Stephen]

If you’ve been browsing Meta you should see that the adverts at the bottom of the page are rotating.

[justin (Justin DiRose)]

I haven’t played around with the ad plugin yet, but is it possible to run house ads alongside network ads? I may have a use case for that in the community I run.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

@sat

Provide option for text link, html ads and also banner ads? May be admin can upload banner and provide related link.

This is all currently possible because you can make text links and show images with simple html. Upload your assets in a staff-only topic or in the theme component where your house ads’ css is defined.

@justin

I haven’t played around with the ad plugin yet, but is it possible to run house ads alongside network ads? I may have a use case for that in the community I run.

That’s the idea. Something like this is what I’m thinking of going with:

@sat

50% in house ads and 50% other type of ads.

How would you want to serve them alongside another ad network?

[mustachianpost]

Amazing work, very timely as it avoided me going through the full setup of Google Ad Manager Thanks a lot for your work!

[Jeremie_Leroy]

@neil, Great plugin,

1- I was wondering, how to make the image responsive, it is not good on the mobile version. I use the below code

I added it here -> https://francais-a-londres.org/

<a href="#" class="h-creative h-donate"> <div> <img src="https://fralondres.s3.dualstack.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/2X/3/348c560154acd77dd653aca6a4a57c53e4ae49ca.png"> </div> </a>

2- is there a way to track the number of views on the image and number of clicks ?

Many thanks

[davidkingham]

1- I was wondering, how to make the image responsive, it is not good on the mobile version.

You can make it responsive by adding this to your css

.house-creative > p > img {
    max-width: 100%;
    height: auto;
}

.widget-connector {
    max-width: 800px;
}

@media only screen and (max-width: 800px) {
    .widget-connector {
        max-width: 100%;
        height: auto;
    }
}

EDIT 2: Had to add an @media for the inline ads as well because they were spilling outside the container.

EDIT: I also had to add this to center the inline ads on mobile, be sure to add it your mobile only css

.house-creative.house-post-bottom {
    margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px;
}

2- is there a way to track the number of views on the image and number of clicks ?

I would recommend using UTM links or using bitly would be very simple.

@neil I love this plugin, the only improvement I would like to see is to have the ability to show different ads to anon vs logged in users on top of the existing ability of having them hidden altogether for specific groups.

[michaeld (Michael - Communiteq)]

Maybe a setting like “show a house ad after X other ads have been shown”. Setting to 1 means half ads shown will be house ads,

It would be better to make it a percentage otherwise you cannot go above 50% house ads. And it will be more intuitive.

[Falco]

@neil I love this plugin, the only improvement I would like to see is to have the ability to show different ads to anon vs logged in users on top of the existing ability of having them hidden altogether for specific groups.

You can put both versions inside each ad, and hide the appropriate when .anon is on the body using CSS.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

FYI the no ads for groups setting is not working, not sure how to help troubleshoot this one.

Edit: Interestingly this seems to be working opposite as intended, when I have the groups added it hides the ads for anonymous users. When I remove the groups the ads come back for anon.

Hmm I can’t reproduce it. I changed meta so that people in the “Team” group don’t see ads (we already wear Discourse shirts and socks every day). Anon can still see ads and I can’t. Seems to be working.

It would be better to make it a percentage otherwise you cannot go above 50% house ads. And it will be more intuitive.

Sure, percentages work too.

[jtbayly]

There are other reasons not to use Google for managing your house ads besides complexity, but that’s reason enough. I’m really looking forward to using this, and we would only be using it for house ads 100% of the time.

[pradeepkumar]

Implemented this on our DeviceBAR Forum, it’s so cool. I totally love it. I just have to figure out the mobile responsiveness part now. Looking forward to seeing more updates related to this plugin.

[Jeremie_Leroy]

@pradeepkumar Nice one, Below is ours with the code, please let us know when you find out about the responsiveness on mobile ;).

Best,

<a href="https://francais-a-londres.org/about">
    <div>
       <img src="https://fralondres.s3.dualstack.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/2X/3/348c560154acd77dd653aca6a4a57c53e4ae49ca.png">
    </div>
</a>