Free Toolsday 10/21 – MaxBannerAds
Tuesday
Oct 21, 2008
I know I haven’t done this feature in a long time, but I want to bring it back! So here we go, and I’m going to tell you about a super easy ad-serving WordPress plugin called MaxBannerAds, brought to you by MaxBlogPress.
From the website, the description of MaxBannerAds is:
Easily add and rotate banners in your wordpress blog anywhere you like without editing any themes or touching any codes.
This is a great tool to use if you’re not so technologically inclined to want to mess with HTML codes on your blog. You can put in the code just as you get it from the ad serving network (whether that’s an affiliate network or otherwise) and it translates that appropriately to the img url and destination url. You can place the banners or text links before your posts, after your posts, at the top of the page, at the bottom of the page, or in your sidebar. It’s really flexible and allows you to advertise efficiently.
There are a couple downsides to this plugin, unfortunately. For one, with the free version you have to keep the “Powered by MaxBannerAds” link below the ad units. You can pay for this tool for $47 and have that link removed, which isn’t a high price to pay if you’re effectively making money off of your advertising. If you have multiple blogs, you only need to pay this fee once to remove the link from all your connected blogs.
The second downside I’ve noticed is that the sidebar links do not track impressions and accurately calculate click-through rate like the other ad placements. That does make it a little more annoying to keep track of performance since you’ll have to go into the different network’s reporting to get that information instead of having it right there on your WordPress dashboard like the others. Of course if you’re not using any sidebar widgets with MaxBannerAds, then you don’t have to worry about this.
Overall it’s a good tool, and totally worth it for free to leave the link and just accept their regular email correspondence as a trade off for using it free. I highly recommend this tool for any blogger that’s a bit of a technie newbie that doesn’t want to risk breaking something!
Comments
Lucero
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:36 am
Thanks for this review. I've been looking for such a tool for wordpress. There is one that I've tried, but it hasn't been intuitive to use. Kind of a pain actually. Hopefully, this one works much better.
TrishaLyn
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Good luck with this one – I found it really easy to figure out. As well, on their website they have screen shots that make it pretty easy to see how it works.