Hard to beat this plugin if you use multiple ad providers

Even tiny blogs with little traffic use Google Adsense, and there are a million plugins out there for that. But once you start catching the attention of advertisers in your own blog, Google Adsense is the lowest-paying solution out there. So you need to either hack your templates and place the code for other advertisers there, or, with luck, get a text widget to handle all those ad providers. What if an advertiser is an individual or company and just wants to run a simple ad for a few months — on just a single page, or category, or just on your posts tagged #fun?

Years ago, like @spynebreaker, I found Advertising Manager. It already figured out automatically the formats for a dozen of different advertisers, and incorporate them under a common interface. Google Adsense, of course, was one of them, but it wasn’t the only one. And of course it also supports non-standard ads — just plain HTML or Javascript, just one image linking to an URL, etc. You can mix everything from multiple advertising sources together — and then place the ads wherever you wish on a widget. Or, if you prefer, inside a blog post or a page with the appropriate shortcode. And if you have your own template, you can even call the ad directly from the template.

Advertising Manager is specially good for handling tiny details. Although widgets these days can be shown only under special conditions — say, only on the front page, or on any page except a category page — Advertising Manager gives far more control over where ads get shown. You can run a campaign just for one author on three categories, and a different campaign for a different author, only when that author tags the posts with #something. The flexibility is tremendous. Then you can also decide how often ads are shown, group ads together, and all those nifty features you expect from a complex advertising manager — but everything is simple enough to do.

What ultimately won me over was the ability to put some extra HTML before and after each ad. I needed that to place two skyscraper ads side by side, from two different advertising sources. Obviously you can accomplish the same using some extra plugins which give better control over how widgets appear on sidebars, or hack your template to do the same. Advertising Manager gives the same flexibility without the need of doing anything beyond adding a few lines of HTML to each ad — on the backoffice, not on the template.

I would have rated it with 4 stars because for some years the plugin lacked any support, but, as @spynebreaker said, there was nothing else available. I was almost tempted to install [ link redacted, please do not post links in reviews ] and get the appropriate WordPress plugin to display OpenX ads, but it was really too much trouble — I don’t generate that much income on my main blog to need to deal with an external ad managing platform. Since the author came back, and is showing tremendously fast support on a long-standing bug which was finally fixed, I feel that this plugin deserves all 5 stars.

It still has room for improvement — it would be nice to get a few more statistics, for example — but if you have a blog with several different sources of advertising, and need a common interface to handle them all (instead of juggling among a handful of plugins), this is the right choice for you.