Advertising Manager Roadmap

Hi – I thought that the community would appreciate my thoughts in regards to how the Advertising Manager roadmap will be laid out.

There is a lot of functionality in Advertising Manager – it allows you to easily place ads in your site, modify your ad tags using a UI, rotate ads, bulk modify information for a number of ads, etc. I want to focus on what the WordPress community uses, and not keep some of the historical features that are not as useful as they once were.

The killer feature of Advertising Manager is to provide the ability to easily add your ad tags to your blog, without the need to edit code. This can be done in blog posts, sidebar widgets, and in templates. This will continue to be the key feature.

In addition, a useful feature of Advertising Manager is to provide simple ad server functionality, like rotating ads, and targeting ads to a particular author or category of blog post. This functionality will remain. If you have any suggestions on how to make this even more useful, please let me know.

Some features, like editing ad tags using the Advertising Manager UI, are not as useful as they once were. Many ad networks now require changes to be made inside their admin interface, rather than changes to be made directly to the tag. By removing this functionality, Advertising Manager will be even easier to understand and use. Over the next couple of months, I will be removing editing the tag through the UI from Advertising Manager.

When Advertising Manager (and Adsense Manager) started many years ago, it was simple to just place an ad tag in the spot where you wanted the ad to display. Ad tags have become more sophisticated. They require script in the header and footer of the page as well as in the place where the ad displays. They need additional scripts to help them understand the user and context of the website. They use ad quality tools, white lists, and other technologies to make sure that their ads are displayed on the right site. Advertising Manager will start to format your ad scripts with more sophisticated tags.

So, in summary, here are the changes that have been and will be made to Advertising Manager:
1. Continue and improve support for easily placing ads on your blog.
2. Continue support for ad targeting and rotation.
3. Remove tag editing features and bulk editing features.
4. Build support for more sophisticated tags

Please do get in touch with me if you would like to beta test some of the newer versions of Advertising Manager (either on this forum or @switzer on Twitter).

Thanks!

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/advertising-manager/