How to set up AdSense Auto Ads in WordPress

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AdSense Auto ads are a simple way to get started showing ads on your WordPress site. This feature allows Google AdSense to decide where, how many and which ad sizes to place automatically. As a publisher, you only need to set it up once and can forget about manually handling each ad individually.

This tutorial shows you how to set up AdSense Auto ads on your WordPress site.

How to set up AdSense Auto ads

You can either read the detailed instructions on adding AdSense Auto ads to WordPress below or watch this short video (1:00 min).

Enable the Auto ads code in your Adsense account

To integrate Auto ads on your website, you first need to enable them in your AdSense account.

  1. Log in to your AdSense account.
  2. Navigate to Ads > Overview > By site.
Google AdSense Auto ads overview
On the overview page, you can edit the settings for each website including the AMP Auto ads options

Here, you can enable Auto ads for each website in your account. Also, you can monitor the Auto ads status and open the global settings for Auto ads on AMP.

Auto ads settings

After clicking the icon to edit the Auto ads settings for one of your websites, you will find more options on the Auto ads settings page.

Auto ads

In the Auto ads section, you can enable or disable Auto ads for the chosen website.

Furthermore, you can find here an option to let Google optimize your existing ad units and replace them partially with Auto ads.

AdSense will run tests and try different formats on your website if you enable this option. Ad formats like vignette ads may appear, which you have disabled in the Auto ads formats settings. The opportunity to disable vignette and anchor ads in these tests is hidden.

Navigate to AdSense > Optimization > Experiments > Auto optimize settings and click on Block an experiment. You can finally disable these two ad formats on the popup that opens.

Ad formats

In this section, you can activate different ad formats that should appear in the Auto ads on your website. These include In-page ads, Multiplex ads, Anchor ads (including desktop devices), Side rails, and Vignette ads (including desktop devices).

Google AdSense Auto Ads settings
Select from the available ad formats and activate those you want to use

Ad load

In this section, you can set the number of ads that Google will display on your website.

Page exclusions

The Page exclusions allow you to specify URLs to pages where you do not want AdSense to display Auto ads, for example, because these pages violate AdSense policies.

Since you have to add the links manually, using the Advanced Ads tools is more manageable, and you should do this later.

When you have finished all the settings, click the “apply to site” button and choose the option “apply now ” on the next screen.

Insert AdSense Auto ads code in WordPress

The Auto ads code is the same code you would insert into your site to verify your AdSense account. So, there is a chance that you already have or had it on your site.

Using WordPress, you can use our free Advanced Ads plugin. It can automatically place the Auto Ads code into the correct spot on your site without needing to touch the code.

Examples of Google AdSense Side Rails
Example of the Side rails ad format

Installing Advanced Ads

Follow these steps to install Advanced Ads from within your WordPress backend. You can also take a look at the video tutorial.

  1. Log in to your WordPress backend.
  2. Click on Plugins in the WordPress menu.
  3. Click on Add New on top of the plugin page.
  4. Search for Advanced Ads in the search field.
  5. Select Advanced Ads from the results and click Install Now.
Advanced Ads on wordpress.org
Advanced Ads on wordpress.org
  1. After you have activated the plugin, you can go to Advanced Ads > Settings > AdSense.
  2. Enter the publisher ID in the AdSense ID field. You can find it in the URL when you are logged into your AdSense account.
  3. Enable the Verification code & Auto ads option.
Connect Advanced Ads and AdSense
Enter your pub-ID and connect with Google AdSense

No further coding is needed. The code will be placed automatically in the right place in your code.

It might take up to 48 hours for ads to appear on your site now.

Display AdSense Auto Ads only on specific pages

You can also display Auto Ads on specific pages, categories, or other site segments when you manage the Auto ads code using Advanced Ads. The setup is a bit different from above.

  1. Get the Auto ads code from your AdSense account.
  2. Go to Advanced Ads > Ads in your WordPress admin panel and create a new ad.
  3. Choose the Plain Text & Code ad type.
  4. Enter the Auto Ads code into the code editor field.
  5. Go to the Display Conditions box and select the conditions, e.g., “Specific Pages” or other Display Conditions.
  6. Publish the ad code.
Excluding Auto ads from specific pages
Use Display Conditions to exclude the ads, e.g., from specific pages
  1. Go to Advanced Ads > Placements and create a new Header code placement (the one with </head> on the icon) and assign your last ad to it.
  2. Save the placements.
  3. If you enabled Auto ads through Advanced Ads > Settings > AdSense, as described above, disable it there.

Disable Auto ads delivered through manually placed AdSense ads

It is possible that Auto ads keep showing up even after you removed all Auto ad codes because AdSense can deliver them through every manually placed AdSense ad as well.

You need to disable this behavior in your AdSense account if you want to keep manually placed AdSense ads without Auto ads.

  1. Go to Ads > Overview > By site and click on the Edit icon next to your site.
  2. Disable the Auto ads option in the Site settings to disable Auto ads completely on that site or use the Page exclusions option to stop them from specific pages.

AdSense Auto Ads on AMP

To integrate auto ads on your AMP pages as well, you first need to enable this option in AdSense > Ads > By site. After that, a page opens with further settings for the AMP ads.

Auto ads AMP settings
Auto ads AMP settings

In the next step, you need to add the AMP Auto Ads to your website.

The easiest way to do that is to enable the Enable AMP Auto ads checkbox in Advanced Ads > Settings > AdSense.

Advanced Ads AdSense settings

Reporting for AdSense Auto Ads

There is no dedicated report for Auto ads.

If you want to test the performance against manually placed ads, navigate to AdSense > Reports. Choose the Ad formats report and see how formats like Anchor, Vignette, etc., are performing.

Reporting in Google AdSense

Customizing AdSense Auto Ads

You can make basic settings for Auto Ads in your AdSense account. In addition, you can further customize the appearance of these ads on your website using some CSS.

Ad Label

If you want to add an individual ad label to the Auto Ads on your website, you can do that with a little bit of code.

You can find detailed instructions with code examples for such an individual label in the Ad Label manual.

Margins and Padding

Auto Ads have margins and padding to the content, creating white spaces that, in some cases, can interfere with the design of a website.

You can adjust this behavior by adding some custom CSS to define, for example, fixed margins above and below the ads.

The following CSS rule causes the spacing above and below the ad to be 15px.

.google-auto-placed {
margin-top:15px !important;
margin-bottom:15px !important;
}Code language: CSS (css)

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Troubleshooting AdSense Auto ads

If AdSense Auto ads are not displaying then please check out AdSense Auto ads not showing up for detailed debugging information.

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