How to create a fallback ad?

Fallback banners are crucial elements in website advertising, providing a contingency plan for publishers when primary ads fail to display.

In this tutorial, I will explain the concept of fallback ads and explore their significance in maintaining revenue streams for website owners. You’ll learn to effectively create and implement fallback ads in WordPress, ensuring continuous monetization and optimal user experience.

What are fallback ads

A fallback ad is a backup advertisement that steps in when targeted ads are unavailable due to factors like display or visitor conditions or when ads expire. By substituting primary ads with relevant alternatives, fallback ads help websites maintain consistency in monetization efforts.

Essentially, a fallback ad is an ad without restrictive conditions, ensuring broad visibility if no higher-paying campaign is available.

In the advertising ecosystem, we call fallback ads also passback ads, fallback banners, or backfill ads. 

If your ad setup meets one of the following three criteria, consider setting up a fallback ad:

  • self-expiring ads
  • multiple display or visitor conditions
  • high-paying ads on specific pages but different ads on all the other pages

In the following sections, we’ll explore how to create and implement fallback ads in WordPress.

You can also follow the instructions in this video tutorial, in which we show you how to set up an English fallback for international visitors on a German-language website.

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Setting up a fallback banner in Advanced Ads

Setting up a fallback banner or passback ad within Advanced Ads is straightforward. Essentially, you’ll create an ad group with the “Ordered” type, ensuring your passback ad occupies the last position within this order.

To initiate a passback ad, navigate to Advanced Ads > Ads and generate a new ad. This ad works like any other, allowing you to tailor it to your preferences. You can choose whether it’s an AdSense backfill, a customized affiliate fallback banner, a newsletter signup form, or whatever you want to embed there.

It’s essential to avoid imposing overly restrictive display or visitor conditions on this fallback ad to ensure its visibility. Remember, this ad unit doesn’t compete with others for the same impression; instead, it only surfaces when other ads fail to deliver. Thus, you need not worry about it detracting impressions from your premium ads. 

Publish the ad first, and then I’ll show you how to integrate it as a fallback.

Applying the fallback banner to an ad group

Ad groups are essential to activating the fallback banner for ad positions, whether applied to placements or inserted manually.

Follow these steps:

  1. Go to Advanced Ads > Groups.
  2. Locate your ad group and click on its name to enter the editing mode.
  3. Switch it to the Ordered type, as illustrated in the image below.

Next, it’s crucial to establish the weight of the ads within the group, ensuring that our fallback banner has the lowest weight.

Setting up a fallback banner and an AdSense backfill ad
Adjust the ad weights to set up your fallback ad

The Ordered ads group sequentially assesses each ad based on the defined ad weight. If an ad cannot be displayed due to limiting display or visitor conditions, the system moves on to the next ad in the queue. Advanced Ads will check the fallback ad last, only displaying it if the preceding ads do not meet their criteria.

I have a premium campaign scheduled to expire by month-end. If this campaign fails to deliver, I’ve set up a high-performing ad targeting new visitors. If a visitor does not meet the “new” criteria, this ad won’t appear (due to failing its visitor conditions), prompting the delivery of my AdSense fallback ad.

Fallback ads and ad refresh 

There is a significant limitation to note when utilizing fallback ads with the ad refresh option enabled. Turning on this option in the group settings would display all ads in the specified order without halting at the first one that meets its conditions. Therefore, this option is incompatible with the fallback scenario outlined above.

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