We’re excited to announce another addition to the AdSanity family – the Conditional Ad Appearance Add-On. It’s 2018 and to herald the new year we have a new expansion. This Add-On is a little different than anything we’ve done so far.

Exploring the Conditional Ad Appearance Add-On

The whole concept behind this Add-On is to give the publisher more control over where ads are visible on the site. A new metabox is available on the Create Ad screen of AdSanity. This “Conditional Ad Appearance” metabox is disabled by default, but is a checkbox away from activation.

conditional ad appearance metabox
The Conditional Ad Appearance Add-On metabox is added to each ad.

Once it’s enabled you may set conditions for the display of the ad. Each ad can have its own set of conditions so you can create entire campaigns that follow unique parameters. There are a lot of granular controls over these conditions.

Setting Conditions

There are three sections to each condition. First, is the condition type. We’ve created an expansive list of options. Anything from a specific user to all pages can be chosen. Taxonomies, post types, or even page templates are all available to hone in to the right target for your ads. You can see a screenshot of the full list below.

conditional ad appearance condition types
The types of conditions that you can set for your ad.

Then you can choose if the condition “is equal to” or “is not equal to” the contextual options. That way you can get specific with the selection that you’re making. For example if you need to specify all but one category you could use the “is not equal to” option.

conditional ad appearance pages condition
Here the condition indicates that the ad will show on your pages.

The contextual option is the third section for setting your condition. We call it the contextual option because the field adapts to the type of condition you chose in the first section. For example, if you choose “Post Taxonomy” the contextual field will populate with your categories and tags.

To really make these conditions granular you can also choose additive or subtractive conditions by using the “And” or “Or” statements. By choosing another condition as an “And” you’re narrowing down where the ad will display. Conversely, choosing an “Or” expands the locations displaying the ad.

conditional ad appearance category condition added
Here the additional category limitation would set the condition to to show the ad on pages OR on posts with the category of Animals.

These conditions stay with the ad whether they are displayed as an individual ad unit or part of an ad group. If you have an ad group that’s on every post in your blog, but you have the ad disabled on a specific category then it won’t show on that category.

A Small Warning

If you’re already using the User Role Ad Visibility Add-On you’re going to want to be sure that you don’t override the functionality in the Conditional Ad Appearance Add-On. It’s possible to achieve similar results to that Add-On with Conditional Ad Appearance. It’s also possible to create a condition where you’re giving conflicting instructions for the ad display. You may want to consider only using one of these plugins at a time.