Sidebar Widget

You can display an ad or an ad group through a widget in your sidebar or another widget group. You can find it under Design > Widgets and use it like any other Widget.

Drag the widget to the widget area you want to use it in and choose the ad, group, or widget placement that you want to display there.

This page contains some additional information about ad widgets and how to use them.

How to set up an ad in your sidebar

Create the ad

To display an ad in your sidebar (or another widget group), you first need to create an ad.

Selecting the ad widget

After you created your ad, go to Design > Widgets. You should find the available widgets on the left side and among them the Advanced Ads widget. If you click on it, it will look like this:

Sidebar ad widget
Add your sidebar ads with the dedicated Advanced Ads widget

Select the widget area here and the Add Widget button.

This will add the ad widget to your sidebar.

Selecting an Advanced Ads block

If you have already changed the management of widgets to blocks on your website, the interface will look a little different. But the handling blocks work similarly to the widgets.

Adding a Advanced Ads block to the sidebar
If you add the Advanced Ads block, you can choose from ads, groups, sidebar widget placements, and manual placements

Ad widget options

Your widget area or sidebar on the right of the widget screen might now look like this after you opened it:

Use the ad widget to choose from ads, groups, and sidebar widget or manual placements

You can select a title for the widget, but you don’t have to.

From the select field, choose an ad, an ad group, a sidebar widget placement, or a manual placement (for ad rotations) that should be displayed, and click on the Save button.

The ad widget should now be visible in the frontend of your site.

Using the sidebar widget placement

Placements in Advanced Ads follow their specific logic for the output. Therefore, you can not choose from all your placements in the select field for the widget output. Use the dedicated sidebar widget placements or the flexible manual placements for this purpose. You can create them on Advanced Ads > Placements

However, because some features of Advanced Ads Pro, such as lazy loading or ads for AdBlockers, require placements for using them, we recommend picking them rather than single ads or groups in the ad widget. Also, this way, you can manage your sidebar ads through the placement page and don’t have to navigate to the widget page frequently.

Available placements for the Advanced Ads widget and block.
These placement types are visible in the widget or block selection

Ad blocks in sidebars

Here are some tricks to show ad blocks in your sidebar using the Advanced Ads widget.

To display more than one ad, you can create a group with multiple ads in it. Don’t forget to also set the number of ads to the amount you want to show up. You can influence the space between ads in the same group using either CSS or the margin settings in the Layout meta box of the ad edit screen.

You can create display blocks even faster with the ad grid feature of Advanced Ads Pro.

Group settings of Advanced Ads to create an ad block with several ad units in one ad group
Add multiple ads to a group to create blocks with ads

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Fixed sidebar widgets

Visitors better notice fixed widgets that stay in the visible screen area even when users scroll your website up or down. You can use our free Fixed Widget for WordPress plugin to make your sidebar ads sticky and to boost their click-through rates that way.

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