“Okay, now that you’ve seen an overview and a brief introduction to Ad Inserter, let’s look at a real test case. One that’s got some underlying mechanics under the hood. It’s some very cool stuff, but in this one, we’re just going to cover the basics.
Here you’ll see Fit Living. It’s obviously fitness for both men and women. And so here’s the header ad, and then here is the sidebar ad. And here is the mid-page ad. And now you notice this is a little bit different. I’ve been tweaking the theme. It won’t look quite like that on yours. This will be centered; it’ll be full width instead of what I did. But it’ll look very much the same. And I’ll show you just as part of tracking the progress on this site, I’ll show you how I did that later. That’ll be in the training from the trenches.
Okay, but how do those get in there? Well, there are a couple of different parts to that, and I’ll link to some resources that you’ll need, at least some beneficial resources in terms of like finding affiliate programs and getting qualified for them and stuff like that. But let’s look at the nuts and bolts of how this is put together, how it’s served up in Ad Inserter.
Obviously, we’ll have to go into the dashboard and then we’ll go to settings and find Ad Inserter. There it is. And I can already see that this is a little bit different than the beginning set that I showed you, right? The structure of Ad Inserter is really simple, and it’s one of the great beauties of the thing is it’s so easy to figure out how stuff needs to go together to make it work.
If I wanted to serve only a single ad, let’s say I wanted to serve that one ad in some particular place, I can just arbitrarily put in here and say “my one ad,” or whatever. But generally, almost always what I want to do is I want to rotate some number of ads in a particular place on my theme. So for that, you just separate them by “Ad Inserter rotate.”
There are a bunch of different options on that separator. But you can tell it’s like, okay, there’s that ad and there’s that ad, and there’s that ad. And I named the block specifically, now I renamed it what I just showed you from the standard Insta blog install. It’s like I needed, I think I called it “header” or something like that. Here, I just simplified it, I just called it that. And you can do the same thing. You can name these things whatever you want to, and then just go update it properly in the theme settings.
I have two sizes, so, you know, 728 by 90 and 324 by 270, that’s the same, right? Just what I previously showed you in the intro. In this particular case, I have way more of the almost square sidebar ads. I have more options there than I do for the header. And even if just do that, that’s as far as you go. That’s really good.
I’m going to show you how to go even further than that in a little bit. But while we’re here, let’s consider a few things that you really got to be careful of. So one is placements. For example, if I uncheck this and hit, well, actually, let’s start with that. So first of all, save settings. Don’t forget to save settings. I’ve done that, okay? And so you definitely want to pay attention to that.
Now, the other thing is placements. So if you uncheck this, right? So here’s my banner, my 728 by 90. So let’s see what happens. If I uncheck homepage, I save settings, and then I go out to the front of the site, oh, what happened? So Ad Inserter is going to insert only on those pages where you tell it it’s allowed to. And so I just turned off my homepage. Now, if I go into one of my post pages, there it is. So be careful of that. That’s something that will really trip you up. That’s something that is easily forgotten. Let me put it that way. I’ve done it more than once.
And insert, there we go. So there are two things there. So one is be, you know, save the other’s like, make sure that you check the pages you want. For example, right now, nothing will appear on category pages. That’s probably wrong. I probably need to fix that, right? I save settings and actually I’ll go through and fix category pages here in a minute. We’ll demonstrate that.
The other thing that happens is the documentation is online and it’s extensive. So by all means avail yourself of that. There are a bunch of other things here. Syntax highlighting is really beneficial. I mean, this happens all the time. So for example, let’s say you missed a quote. Notice what happened to the syntax highlighting, you know, this is wrong, right? That’s supposed to be in that pink-purple, whatever that is. Chartreuse, one of those, you know, not a guy color. And so I don’t know what the error is, but I know it’s wrong because this is not colored properly. So, okay, well figured it out.
Syntax highlighting, the documentation, you know, be careful where you’re placing things. Manual shows you the shortcode to use. And so there’s a bunch of other training that I’ll provide on this, but I’m just trying to give you the most important bits that will really trip you up if you’re not watching.
There’s one more actually. Okay, let’s do that. Yeah. And so, save settings, I’m going to open up in a new window so I don’t lose where I’m at. I’m going to visit the site. Go here. Remember, we just noticed that there’s nothing designated for category pages, okay? So let’s go work out for men, and sure enough, our header’s empty. So that’s not what we want, is it? Right? Well, guess what? Our sidebar’s empty too. Oops.
Okay, come back here. Like I said, it’s important and it’s easy to get tripped up on it. Category pages, alright now, okay? You don’t have to save it immediately. I mean, this is all in the browser at the same time, right? So I’m going to go over here too. So now notice, okay, they’re both live. I haven’t lost anything yet. Let’s do tag and category pages as well right now. Search pages. Mm. Sure. Now static pages, no, because static pages I would normally do that would normally be like a landing page for me, so I don’t think I want to include them.
And so I’ve got everything except static pages selected and now hit save settings. So now I should be live. So let’s go back to the live site and refresh and sure enough, we fixed the glitch.
Okay? So hope that helps. And the next one, actually, I’ll give you a tease by just showing you. So here’s a list of ads show only to men. So I want to bifurcate the ads I show to men and to women. And I can do that by selecting what category pages it’ll be on. We’ll get to that in the next video. Okay?”
