Advanced Ads Pro features a sophisticated mechanism that distinguishes by the user roles on your website. By leveraging the User Role visitor condition for ads or placements, you can be precise in determining who views them.
Imagine managing a blog with multiple authors; you can prevent serving editors AdSense ads to ensure authentic ad impression numbers. Alternatively, on a membership site, you could hide ads from paying members, making them exclusive to non-members.
This manual will teach you how to utilize the User Role condition effectively.
Table of Contents
Understanding user roles in WordPress
WordPress employs a system of roles, empowering site owners to dictate user privileges. Each role comes with a distinct set of permissions, from writing and editing posts to moderating comments and managing plugins. WordPress comes with multiple pre-defined roles and every role boasts specific capabilities.
Rather than ranking roles hierarchically, view them as delineating user responsibilities within the site:
- Administrator: Full access to all administrative functions within a single site
- Editor: Ability to publish and manage posts, including those of other users
- Author: Can publish and manage personal posts
- Contributor: Able to write and manage posts but not publish them
- Subscriber: Limited to managing their profile
During WordPress installation, an Administrator account is automatically created. You can configure the default role for new users via Dashboard > Settings > General. The WordPress documentation provides more information about user roles and capabilities.
Implementing the User Role condition
Activate the Advanced Visitor Conditions in Advanced Ads > Settings > Pro to make this unique visitor condition available. Now, you’ll be able to integrate the User Role condition into specific ads or entire placements to target distinct user groups.
Create or edit an ad, scroll to the Targeting section, and add the User Role visitor condition. Select the user roles you wish to target from the dropdown menu and specify whether to show or hide the ad unit for the selected user roles.
Feel free to apply the User Role visitor condition multiple times to precisely target multiple roles concurrently, aligning with your website’s user structure!
Example: Tailoring ad visibility for specific user groups
Consider configuring a condition for an ad unit that should remain hidden from the ‘Golden Member’ and ‘Silver Member’ user roles. Such a strategy is commonly used to promote paid memberships internally. The following screenshot shows the targeting arrangement.
Handling ad targeting by user role on cached sites
Implementing Cache Busting on cache-enabled websites is crucial to maintain the fluid correlation of targeted ads and user categorizations in real-time. Without this critical feature, users could potentially be subject to outdated information that fails to align with their current membership status.
Hiding all ads from specific user roles
For control over ad display in general to specific user groups, head to Advanced Ads > Settings > General > Disable ads.
Here, you may exclude individual user roles from ad delivery site-wide—independent from and overriding any checks or conditions applied to ads and placements.