This page covers information about Advanced Ads ad setups on multisite installation.
A multisite is a very specific setup for WordPress that allows you to build a network of sites with multiple URLs, but only one installation of the main core. This manual on wordpress.org covers it.
If you are looking for a solution to manage ads on a single WordPress site and show them on sites that don’t use Advanced Ads or even WordPress then check out the WordPress Ad Server placement.
Table of Contents
General information about Advanced Ads on multisites
Each activation of Advanced Ads on a site in your network works for its own. You can create different ads, have different options, and different add-ons installed. They are not interfering with each other unless you want to.
Licenses on multisites
You can install and activate Advanced Ads and the add-ons on as many sites in your multisite network as your license has activations.
The license needs to be activated on the main blog in your network to allow automatic updates.
ads.txt on multisites
Advanced Ads can create an ads.txt file on multisites automatically. In the backend of the main site of your network go to Advanced Ads > Settings > General > ads.txt. You should see the option to generate the ads.txt file for the whole network.
For more information on this see also ads.txt on multisites.
Loading an ad from one site on another
The following information only makes sense for real multisite installations. If you are looking to use ads hosted on one WordPress installation on a second one, you can follow the ad server setup.
With Advanced Ads Pro installed on both sites, you can load an ad, group or placement hosted on one site in the multisite network on another. This can be done using shortcodes only, though, so in the case of placements, you can only use the Manual placement.
In order to load an ad, group or placement, you have to add the blog_id to the shortcode.
The example of an ad shortcode below loads the ad with the ID 123 from blog 1 and can be used on every other blog in the multisite network where Advanced Ads and Advanced Ads Pro are activated.
[[the_ad id="123" blog_id="1"]]Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)The shortcode for a placement could look like this:
[[the_ad_placement id="manual-placement" blog_id="1"]]Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)What else to know about ads on multisites
If you want to use Analytics tracking for these ads then enable the Tracking add-on on both sites with the correct tracking method and Analytics ID selected. Database Tracking works with the Tracking add-on only enabled on the ad-hosting site.
Display and Visitor Conditions will either be ignored or broken. If you want to use these conditions, you should create a new ad on the displaying blog using the “rich media” ad type and put the shortcode from the other ad into the content field. You can assign conditions to that intermediate ad.
AJAX Cache Busting is not working. But if you use the shortcode of a placement and have Advanced Ads Pro activated on both sites, passive Cache Busting should work.
All in all, this is a fragile feature, so please test it carefully.
Troubleshooting
The following message might come up in your multisite children:
An error occured: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 3001 milliseconds with 0 bytes received.Code language: JavaScript (javascript)The cause is that the multisite children can’t create the ads.txt file in their subdirectory while there is already one ads.txt for the main page. Please ignore this message:
In some rare cases, you might see the message There is no record for this period :( for ads you know have records. To resolve this, navigate to Advanced Ads > Tracking > database management and click on “rebuild tables” to bring the stats back.