Inheriting ad settings to a group of ads in WordPress

/Tutorials /Inheriting ad settings to a group of ads

A repeated question in support is how one can use the same conditions for multiple ads at the same time instead of managing them for each ad individually. This is especially useful when using ad groups that need a general layout adjustment or when all ads have the same visitor or display conditions.

Using the Ad Group ad type

You can use the Ad Group ad type to assign visitor or display conditions directly to all ads that belong to a particular ad group. 

The setup basically looks like this:

• you group the inheriting ads into the same ad group
• you create an intermediate ad with the Ad Group ad type
• you assign the group to that ad

When using the Ad Group ad type, the ad parameters of the intermediate ad show this option:

You can now assign any parameters, display, or visitor conditions to the intermediate ad.

Please note that Advanced Ads Pro provides a feature to directly add those conditions to specific placements. For example, if you want to display a sticky anchor ad on mobile devices only, you don’t need to inherit those settings but can adjust this setting on the placement page.

Displaying the intermediate ad works exactly like every other ad. In addition to normal ad output, it will display the group according to the group settings (random, multiple ads, etc.).

More scenarios

Here are some more ideas for when to use the Ad Group ad type setup.

Rotate ad groups

With the setup above, you can also rotate ad groups. Just create an intermediate ad for each group and put those into another group.

You could accomplish a setting like the following easily:

• Ad Group 1: show 50% of the time; has ad A in it
• Ad Group 2: show 50% of the time; has ads B, C, and D in it which also rotate

Track all ads together

You can set up tracking information for a whole group so that the impressions and clicks for all ads are tracked together. This makes it also more comfortable to set up multiple ads with the same target URL.

Limitations

• The intermediate ad can not be added to the ad group it is displaying, or else it might create an infinite loop. This should not be possible programmatically, but still good to know.
• Setting different conditions within the individual ads in the group compared to those in the intermediate ad might lead to unexpected behavior.
• Visitor conditions of the individual ads within the selected group only work on cached sites when using cache-busting.

Starting in 2009, Thomas’ own word game website grew to 40 MM page impressions per month. He then built Advanced Ads to help his colleagues to place ads and test different ad positions and networks tests without any coding skills. Thomas now enjoys improving the product for our more than 150,000 users worldwide.