Reviews

Today I came across a make money online product that goes beyond the normal ideas of making a website, providing value and marketing to people.

The question I have of it is whether it actually a valid way to make money or just another scam trying to take your hard earned cash.

The Manifestation Millionaire by Darren Regan

The idea behind the Manifestation Millionaire is that through a change of thinking you can change your life dramatically, and create wealth.

The ebook is designed to help you change your way of thinking, so if you’re looking for a product to help you build a successful business or learning marketing then this is most definitely not the product for you.

The method that Darren has apparently perfected is what he calls “Portal Jumping”. I was sad to find out he didn’t mean this literally so my childhood dream of teleportation went out the window.

Instead, it’s a mindset thing, as Darren explains:

It’s like a backdoor built into the fabric of the Universe opens up. You just “jump” through to an entire new world.

People, places, things, and events begin to change around you…

Lack and limitation disappear. Abundance and opportunity shows up everywhere you turn.

The idea is very close to a much debated system called the Law of Attraction.

What I found interesting was that the sales video for the product clearly states that the Manifestation Millionaire has nothing to do with the Law of Attraction:

However, I found an older written sales page that is virtually word for word for the video sales page which states that actually it was envisioned as part of the Law of Attraction:

Obviously Darren is trying to shy away from that method, yet his process which is apparently based on “cutting-edge neuroscience” is really very close to it.

The science is based on things called “mirror neurons” which are real but we have clear idea on what they do:

To date, no widely accepted neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

This of course opens them up to wild speculation and tinfoil hat ideas.

Bold, Exaggerated Claims

While I’m all up for some self-improvement, after all our biggest enemy is ourselves, the claims that Darren is making here are hard to swallow.

The belief that you can do something is great, but the way it’s worded is that you literally just think about it and it will happen.

This is a terrible thing to say to people because it’s simply not true. There’s nothing out there that will materialise a new car or wealth or the love of your life because you think about it.

Now, you might be thinking that I’m taking this too literally and that the process is much slower etc. That’s perhaps true but I’m echoing the sales pitch here, and this is what you and others are being told, but it’s a lie.

Simply jumping through an imaginary portal will not result in you getting a new car. Now, jumping through the portal, believing in yourself, working hard and waiting while you earn the money to buy a new car? Yeah that’s believable, but sadly that won’t sell an overpriced ebook to people.

Let’s See Some Evidence

The Manifest Millionaire has a lot to say, the video is over 40 minutes long, but does it prove anything?

Well, no. The thing is the whole idea behind this system is that you need to believe, so apparently the sales pitch is hoping you’ll just believe it too.

There are some testimonials added to the site. Normally these are stock photos and unprovable words, but here there is a catch. Some of the people giving testimonials are actually real (as far as I can tell).

It’s not beyond some people to scrape image and names off the internet and attribute a fake quote to them, knowing you’ll Google them and hoping they won’t find the site.

Whether this is the case with the Manifest Millionaire is currently an unknown, though I have reached out to some of the people who I could track down, only time will tell if they respond or not.

Either way, you have some potentially faked testimonials and the word of the ebook creator as proof this works, which is not a lot to go on.

There is also little to say about Darren Regan – who is he and why should you believe him? I’ve no idea to be honest. I could not trace any information about him or his prior activities. Personally I’m not entirely sure he’s real.

Take this from the products affiliate page:

Who’s John? Is that the real person behind this? It’s hard to say but it certainly puts doubt on the legitimacy of this product.

Another thing that’s noteworthy is the number of upsells you will be hit with after buying the product:

Upsells by themselves aren’t inherently bad, but you should know what you are getting yourself into after you purchase the product.

The Bottom Line

Is the Manifestation Millionaire and outright scam?

No, definitely not. You do after all get a lengthy ebook about self-improvement.

However, that does not mean I recommend this product. The sales pitch is incredibly hyped up, making you feel like the moment you finish reading the book you’ll become a millionaire.

Don’t get me wrong, a good mindset is critical to making money online, especially with all the failures that will inevitably occur, but mindset is not everything.

To make money online, and good money at that, you’ll need skills and experience, as well as time, patience and probably a little seed money.

The Manifestation Millionaire is also quite overpriced for an ebook, especially as there are lots of existing resources online for self-improvement that are free.

If you’re looking to make money online and want actual targeted teaching to help you achieve it, then I’d suggest avoiding the Manifestation Millionaire and look to get proper training.

If there’s one thing to take away from my Instapage review, it’s this:

The importance of a landing page cannot be overstated.

These pages are designed to focus on one thing, whether it’s to sell a product or to get people to sign up to a mailing list.

Distractions are a major issue when it comes to converting people, even things like your sites menu, or adverts or the latest post feed can have people wandering off to explore instead of taking action.

The idea behind landing pages is to reduce the clutter and shiny things that may distract people so that they focus only on what’s in front of them, which ideally is the action you want them to take.

Creating landing pages on existing websites, especially with CMS’ like WordPress, can be a chore. Also you may not want to even create a site on a domain, but just one or more landing pages instead.

Luckily there are tools out there that can assist you with this, one such is Instapage

What is Instapage?

Instapage is a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) online program that allows you to create landing pages for one or many domains.

Depending on your site setup, nearly everything is self-contained within the Instapage site allowing you to build and manage all your landing pages from one location.

Instapage uses an amazing drag and drop system to build pages, so let’s go through what it takes to get an Instapage landing page created.

Creating a New Page

Once you log into Instapage you‘ll see two buttons, one to create a new page and one to create a group.

Groups are merely for organization and you can create them and assign pages to them at a later date.

If you click the new page button you’ll see a pop up.

This allows you to create a new page from a template (including a blank one) or even upload a template from a different source.

Instapage provides you with 193 Templates, plus 1 blank one to get started with. Plus you have the ability to import free or premium templates sourced from designers located on sites like ThemeForest.

With so many template options it’s nice that Instapage have some filtering options based on the most commonly used landing page types such as Lead Generation, E-book, Apps, etc.

Some of the template designs are similar but there’s a lot of choice just in the default templates which is great, especially if you’re not too great with designing things. You can also preview these without committing to them which is a nice touch.

After selecting a template you need to name it.

After that then it’s down to modifying the template for your own needs using Instapage’s drag and drop builder.

Using the Instapage Landing Page Builder

Perhaps like me you’ve used a variety of page builders before. They often have some limitations or are awkward to use, especially when it comes to the placement of different elements like forms, images or tittles.

Instapage doesn’t suffer from this at all – it’s a true drag and drop builder and it’s a delight to use!

Every element on the page can be moved wherever you want, no blocks, no columns, nothing like that – you have full freedom to place elements wherever you want!

There is a downside to this though as while there are some guidelines (that cannot be moved), there is only a limited snap to grid system.

This means that getting elements precisely positioned can be a pain. Luckily there are some keyboard shortcuts that can be used. These aren’t mentioned anywhere that I could see but if you click an element you can use the keyboard arrows keys to move the elements a pixel at a time.

Use SHIFT + keyboard arrow keys to move elements 10 pixels at a time.

By selecting multiple elements with the shift key, you can also group elements together and change their alignment relative to one another.

One disappointment was the inability to group elements and then edit certain things such as the font color.

This means you have to select each element individually, edit it then change the color and save. Not a deal breaker but it makes things a bit more awkward and time consuming if you decide at the end that the font color should be blue and not pink.

Also, the color was not retained for new elements which made it a little frustrating when you need to add a lot of text elements to a darker background and have to constantly edit each one to change the color away from black.

Free Images

One of the pains of getting a landing page made quickly and easy is image selection. I can’t count the number of times I’ve spent more time finding and choosing an image than actually creating the content!

Instapage eases this by supplying 100 free background images. These are fairly generic but they cover a wide range of topics such as scenery, coffee cups, people typing on keyboards, and so on.

You can also buy images directly from Bigstock while within Instapage, but the prices are quite expensive at $4.99 an image – you can certainly get stock photos cheaper.

There were also two other things missing from the images: icons and patterns.

Of course you can import these, but a small selection of basic icons and patterns would have really helped make Instapage that bit more special and help validate it’s price.

Blocks

I know I said that Instapage doesn’t use a block system, and that’s still true, but it does have something called blocks.

Blocks are like mini templates for different sections of your Instapage. Included are approximately 113 templates consisting of the following types of blocks:

• Headers
• Benefits
• Descriptions
• Steps
• Testimonials
• Pricing Tables
• Call to Action

Blocks will help you speed up your page creation by allowing you to insert common elements as a framework, meaning you just need to fill in the details.

It doesn’t take long to modify a block to make a pretty professional looking section of the site and you again have the power to move any of the block elements wherever you want on the page.

You can also save your blocks for reuse on any of your other Instapage landing pages.

I’ve Ran Out of Undos

Instapage has a limited undo feature, it’s OK, but if you really need to go back more than 10 changes you’re out of luck.

The worst thing I found was the complete lack of any form of autosave. If you’re in the middle of changes, forget to save and your cat closes turns off your compute (yes, my cat has done that to me on more than one occasion), then you’re starting your landing page from scratch.

The Mobile Generator is a God-Send

By default you are on the desktop view of your landing page. By clicking the toggle at the top you can swap to the mobile view.

Instapage landing pages are not truly responsive; instead the mobile view will automatically try to turn your desktop view into something usable on mobile devices.

It’s not perfect and you will need to tweak the design to fit on mobiles.

Oddly it doesn’t show how it will look on phablets and tablets which are generally wider than your typical phone.

As such you may be tempted to preview the page and resize your browser window. This will show that the page is not responsive!

Fear not though, because I also panicked at this stage and ended up doing some tests. While resizing the browser resulted in a less than optimal site until it hits phone size, when viewed on an actual tablet or mid-sized device it looks perfect!

A/B Testing: The Most Useful Tool Offered

Before I discuss this, know that the A/B testing feature is only available on the Instapage Optimizer plan or higher: see the Pricing section below for more info.

A basic landing page can work well, but unless you already know your audience intimately a landing page will require tweaking to make it perform at its best. To do this you need to use A/B testing (also known as Split Testing).

Instapage’s A/B testing is built into the landing page builder itself, and can be activated from the top left of the page.

Click the Create an A/B Test link and you can then create a variation. You can either create a new variation (so based on your current design), or choose/import a template.

You can seemingly create as many variations as you want (I got to Variation F before I got bored), though in reality 2 of 3 versions is sufficient.

From here it’s simply a case of modifying your variations and saving.

Publishing Pages

There are a few choices when it comes to actually showing the world your landing page:

Custom Domain

This is probably the most technical option as it requires you to mess about with CNAMES and things like this. It’s probably the most ideal option if you just want a domain with the landing page and that’s it or you want the landing page as a subdomain such as mylandingpage.example.com.

WordPress

If you’re a WordPress user then this is by far the easiest option. All you need to do is install a plugin and log in to Instapage from the plugin.

It will then pull your landing pages in and you can select a URL where you want the landing page to show, such as example.com/mylandingpage.

Facebook

This will show your mobile version of the page on Facebook. I actually couldn’t get this to work for some reason, but the idea is that the landing page is published to a Facebook page.

Demo Page

If you just want to see how the landing page will look on a real site then this is your option. It saves the page to a demo site which you can view live on any device. Perfect for making sure it looks right on multiple devices and in multiple browsers.

Instapage Analytics: What does it tell you?

Landing pages are worthless without knowing the stats behind them. Luckily Instapage makes this pretty easy.

You can connect your page with Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and Google Tag Manager.

As well as that you can set conversion goals for links and subscriptions which are shown in Instapage’s own analytics section.

Another handy tool that Instapage provides is the Heatmap tool. This allows you to see precisely what people are doing on your page.

There are 3 types of heatmaps you can view:

• Scroll depth – how far down the page people scrolled
• Clicks – where on the page people clicked
• Mouse movement – where the mouse was located on the screen

Combined, these different analytics systems and features should give you more than enough information to make informed decisions about the page and what tweaks need to be made.

Documentation

While Instapage is quite intuitive, there are a lot of hidden settings and features, so I was glad to see that the documentation for Instapage is large and detailed.

As well as written text that has plenty of pointer images, the most popular topics also have accompanying videos.

The documentation is clear and easy to follow, which is perfect for when you get stuck with something!

Instapage Pricing

Instapage starts at $69 per month and goes up $179 per month with even more expensive Enterprise options out there.

Quality products cost time and money to make, and as such they can often cost the end user a decent amount as well.

If you want A/B testing (which you should want) and Heatmaps, then you’ll need to go for the middle level, Optimizer.

As well as that the month to month prices are significantly higher than the annual pricing. At the Optimizer level, paying month to month will cost you $30 per month extra.

I get that paying annually should offer a saving, but it does feel like they are gouging monthly subscribers.

Is Instapage Worth it?

If you are an occasional user, it’s hard to justify the high-monthly costs, especially when you need the more expensive plans to unlock the best features.

A one-month minimum trial is strongly recommended. You can test your current landing page against variations to see what exactly you are leaving behind.

If you are someone running multiple campaigns perhaps even over multiple websites then yes, it is definitely worth it.

The ease of creating pages and the added features easily offset the cost if you’re using landing pages regularly.

Why Not Use a WordPress Landing Page Builder Instead?

There are a lot of landing page solutions out there, especially for WordPress so you might be wondering why Instapage is a better alternative.

Well, as mentioned above, if you’re a very light user or low on funds, then a WordPress alternative probably is better for you.

If you’re a power user then there are several reasons why you should consider Instapage over the alternatives:

It’s Easy

I can’t get over how beautiful and easy to use the Instapage builder is. Sure it has some areas that could be improved, but I’ve used a lot of builders and this one was an absolute delight to use. There will be no more fighting the builder to get the exact layout you want, which is priceless.

It’s Just for Landing Pages

If you look at something like Thrive Leads for example, Thrive do a lot of other products including Leads. Instapage focus purely on their Landing Page product so all of their time, expertise and effort goes into making it the best landing page system out there.

Multiple Pages, Multiple Sites

This is a big one for a power user: you can manage all your landing pages across numerous domains from one control panel. Not more logging into this site or that site or dealing with different software on different sites.

Asset Management

Instapage allows you to host assets directly on their server and server them to your subscribers directly.

The Bottom Line

I’m beyond impressed with the features offered by Instapage.

With the free trial they offer, it’s a no-brainer that this one comes with a very positive recommendation.

It’s not the cheapest option out there, in fact it’s fairly expensive, so you do really need to make sure you’ll use it.

If you can get over the price then the builder is wonderful, and so easy to use you’ll be firing out landing pages left, right and center!

I’d definitely recommend Instapage to anyone with multiple sites who needs to have multiple landing pages across the site network.

Continuing with my advertising plugin for WordPress series, I’d like to talk to you about another effective advertising plugin called Ads Pro.

This plugin is only available on CodeCanyon and to my knowledge doesn’t have any free version to test, so it’s daunting to put money on the line when you’re not sure if it fits your needs or not.

As such let’s go through the plugin and see how it functions.

Ads Pro Setup

This plugin is pretty easy to set up. To begin with it’s a standard install with no other requirements – it’s self-contained unlike Advanced Ads which required Woocommerce.

The plugin is usable without the purchase code but some features are locked until you add it in, meaning use on a development site might potentially get tricky.

Other than that, the settings are straightforward for things like payments and notifications.

The settings also allow you to customize the look of things without needing to resort to CSS. This can be good for those with no or only rudimentary CSS skill but if you know CSS fairly well you may find the styling options limiting.

The plugin integrates with BBPress and BuddyPress so has appropriate options. It also has a “hooks” area where you can add advert shortcodes at specific points such as after the 4^th paragraph of content or after the content.

Ad Spaces

Before you can create adverts you need to add a Space. These are effectively groups and they cover everything from the cost of the advert to the number of adverts shown, order, devices etc.

Each space allows you to limit the number of adverts, which is great especially if you’re looking to sell advertising space.

This is also where you’ll be adding the style of advert, which I found odd, but you can select from a wide range of display types including:

• Carousel – slide or fade
• Top or Bottom Scroll Bars
• Floating (4 options)
• Pop-up
• Corner Peel
• Layer
• Background
• Exit pop-up
• Link

It’s also here that you’ll define the template or dimensions of the adverts. There are a lot of standard sizes here such as 125×125 and 728×90 and so on.

A somewhat unintuitive feature is available to create custom sized templates. This Standard Ad Creator menu doesn’t appear at first and its wording didn’t tell me what it was. Still, you can create custom template sizes which is good.

Creating an Advert

Once a space has been defined creating adverts is really easy.

As you can see it is pretty much selecting the billing model (if you need that) and adding a URL and image.

The one thing I fell afoul of was image file size. The plugin doesn’t really state what to use and I noticed that larger image sizes got rejected and that rejection reset all the data I had added.

Displaying Adverts

If you’re not using the inbuilt hooks or the (very basic) widget then you can also display adverts by adding their shortcodes to locations in content or if you’re technically minded by adding a PHP snippet to theme templates.

Here’s my test advert after the 4th paragraph using an Amazon logo as my advert image.

Advert Analytics

Whilst pretty and effective I found the analytics area for Ads Pro to be messy and overwhelming and this is before I added any adverts!

I think it’s made worse by having sections for the extensions even though those extensions were not installed.

Overall though you do get the data that you need in order to see how the adverts are performing.

I also noticed that additional clicks/views per user account were not recorded which is usually a good thing.

Ads Pro also includes an A/B testing system for the adverts (though again this only becomes visible after you create an advert).

A/B testing is a great way to check how an advert is performing and is also a great selling point.

However, the A/B tests that Ads Pro provides are very flawed. Instead of what you would expect of one or the other advert being shown to see which advert performs best, Ads Pro basically just compares the data of the two adverts.

Really this is not an A/B test as both adverts are still shown at the same time!

Selling Adverts

Once you have some Spaces set up you can sell adverts to people. This is as easy as adding a shortcode to a page.

It’s a simple method to sell adverts that look professional. The only thing that seemed to be missing was how to provide more information and direction to potential customers for example about image sizes. Sure you can this to the Space title but that’s limited.

Geolocation

As well as being able to select certain pages/posts and categories to display ads, Ads Pro supports geolocation at the Space level.

This means that each space can be only shown or hidden for specific countries. You can even narrow it down to specific cities or zip codes.

Support

Support is done via Code Canyon and the author seems responsive enough, often answering within hours or a query.

There Are Extensions

The core plugin for Ads Pro is sufficient for most people’s needs, but it does have several extensions that you can buy to expand its feature set:

Ad Templates for Cornerstone

This extension adds integration for the Cornerstone builder plugin making it easy to insert adverts into those templates.

WordPress Affiliate Program

This extension allows you to leverage affiliates for generating more advertising leads.

WordPress Marketing Agency

Want to sell adverts on other people’s sites? Then this extension is for you as it allows you to become an advertising agency.

Is it Developer Friendly?

Can this plugin be easily extended? Well it depends on what you are trying to do. For minor things it should be fine as I found 16 action hooks and 15 filter hooks in the version I tested.

That being said, the use case I needed to modify the plugin for could not be done due to a lack of hooks in the right places, probably because 12 of the action hooks focus on content alone.

As such if you have a complicated use case then I would say there’s no decent way of extending this plugin.

The Bottom Line

Ads Pro is a great plugin but it has flaws. It looks great but seems to lack in certain areas and is quite unintuitive.

I was also dismayed by the completely wrong implementation of A/B testing! It’s effectively useless.

If you’re looking for an affordable advertising system for your own use then Ads Pro is definitely a contender. If you’re looking to sell adverts then the plugin is viable, and certainly looks the best out of all the plugins I’ve reviewed, but it’s not perfect.

As mentioned the A/B test is laughable and the inability to provide direction on a per Space basis is unfortunate.

Overall the plugin has great potential and if the developers decide to invest more time in the development, it could become a powerhouse in the WordPress advertising plugin market.

Right now, it’s average to good.

A dropshipping store is like any other ecommerce store, except the business owner doesn’t have to rent a warehouse, pay for lease on a physical store, or stock the products. This means before you could “sell” products, you have to build an online store using one of the many ecommerce platforms available in the market today.

If you’re comparing ecommerce platforms for your dropshipping store, your options may include Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, YoKart, Shopify, Big Cartel, Open Cart, Zen Cart, Symphony Commerce, Drupal Commerce and a whole lot more. But if this is your first foray into the world of dropshipping and ecommerce, here’s why Shopify should be your top choice…

Why Choose Shopify?

The number one reason why over 350,000 online shops have chosen Shopify as their ecommerce platform is because there’s no need for programming, or web design knowledge to set-up a Shopify store. You can basically launch a new store in minutes.

Shopify is best for beginners because of these reasons:

1. Template availability – Shopify has a ton of free, ready-to-use themes to choose from. These themes are professionally made, mobile-ready, highly responsive, and designed with the customer in mind. There’s also option for paid templates, if you want better customization and more features.

2. Massive app store – Shopify has its own collection of extensions and plugins, which help expand the functionality of an online store. Example of tools available at the Shopify app store include tools on stock and inventory, reporting, shipping, customer service, store analytics, and social media, among others.

There are over 1,500 free and paid apps available, all of which are already compatible with Shopify and are easy to install. You can cherry-pick only those that would best fit your business, or experiment on new tools that could skyrocket your sales to newer heights.

Shopify even gives its members a way to connect to mobile app developers, who can customize their apps for you (for a fee, of course).

3. Quick-connect to Facebook and other Cross-Channel Selling Capability – One of the best things about Shopify is that it allows you to connect your store with a Facebook page, and sell directly from the largest social media network today via the Shopify Facebook App. You can also sell in other platforms like Pinterest, Houze, Twitter, and Wanelo for a wider reach of your target market.

4. Huge Community to Help – Even if Shopify is aimed at beginners and designed to set-up a store quickly, problems could still arise. What’s great with Shopify is that aside from its 24/7 livechat and phone support, the community forum is also home to many friendly and helpful people who are (or have been) on the same boat as you and are ready to guide you with Shopify questions you may have.

Shopify also publishes tutorial posts, case studies, and success stories regularly.

5. Built-in SEO Functions – Competition is fierce in ecommerce, which is why it’s a big plus that Shopify has SEO functionalities available. By taking advantage of these features, such as adding tags, editing meta tags, adding product descriptions, arranging collections, etc., your Shopify online store would be “seen” by search engine crawlers and indexed. This means that when someone searches the tags you used on search engine, your store could be one of the results listed.

Shopify Isn’t for Everyone

The benefits of using Shopify for your dropshipping store are numerous, but not everyone could succeed with this platform. Here’s why:

1. Shopify Payment – Members are basically forced to use Shopify Payment since every transaction made from your store would incur 2% transaction fees if you choose another payment gateway like PayPal. This is on top of the 5% transaction fee PayPal deducts from every payment you receive.

Unfortunately, you can’t just skip PayPal. It has been proven by multiple testing and testimonies that adding PayPal to an online store increases conversion rates for up to 30%. That’s a huge percentage to ignore.

2. Expenses Add Up – Shopify lets you try the platform for 14 days without charge, but if you decide to subscribe, you’ll have to pay monthly charges of $29/month (Basic), $79/month (Shopify Plan), $299/month (Advanced Shopify), or $2,000+/month (Shopify Plus). Other expenses could also add up, such as customization of themes and apps, and turnover fees (from between 0.5% and 2.0% of the product amount).

In addition, if Shopify decides to up their subscription plans in the future, you’ll have no choice but to continue, or move to another platform completely.

3. Limited CMS Capability – Shopify may seem like WordPress with its availability of themes and plugins, but the limits begin to show once you’re inside the Shopify platform. Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress are popular for a reason – the potential for development and customization are endless.

4. Shopify only lets you create two types of content – a blog post, or a page. It can be hard to create additional text fields for products, or link posts to products. The cheapest Shopify plan also doesn’t have the best search mechanism, and no advanced filtering for product searching available.

5. Scalability isn’t an Option – It’s good to start small, but if you plan to expand your dropshipping store in the future, it would be a pain financially and emotionally because:

• Everything is hosted on Shopify. All customizations, uploads, and other content will be hard to export to a new host.
• You’ll lose Google rankings. If you started with Shopify, but want to move to your own hosted site, the search engine rankings your Shopify store has earned will be all for nothing. Your new site would have to be re-indexed, causing your original site to lose traffic.
• Exporting data is hard work. All customer data and order details are stored on Shopify. You’re able to export this data, but it is a lot of hassle to do so.

The Bottom Line

Shopify is a great choice for company online stores that house only limited items. If you’re planning to build a dropshipping business, you’d find more success buying a domain name, using a full-featured CMS like WordPress, and be in full control of your website.

Plus, since scalability is key to dominate the dropshipping model, your best bet is to learn how to build a store from scratch, and not be tempted with Shopify’s plug-and-play solution.

Off the back of our recent review of AdRotate Pro I thought you might like to know about some of the other options there are when it comes to adding adverts to your WordPress site.

Today I’m going to review Advanced Ads by Thomas Maier, a fully featured plugin that has some interesting takes on advertising.

Advanced Ads

Like most premium WordPress plugins nowadays, there is also a free version of Advanced Ads that you can pick up to try. It is fairly feature filled on its own with only advanced features being reserved for the premium plugin.

The plugin has been around for 3 years with regular updates. It has also been downloaded over 800,000 times and has over 50,000 current installations.

This might not be quite like AdRotate, but unlike that plugin Advanced Ads scores an excellent 4.9 out of 5 on WordPress.org user reviews with a similar number of reviews (about 100 less).

The premium version is itself split into several plugins: the core premium version and additional addon plugins.

What do you get?

• Advanced Ads Pro (the core premium plugin)
• Ad Tracking
• Responsive Ads
• Geo Targeting
• PopUp and Layer Ads
• Selling Ads
• Slider
• Sticky Ads

There’s also another addon called Genesis Ads, specifically for Genesis theme users, but this can be gotten for free from the Advanced Ads site.

Some Requirements

Unlike a lot of premium plugins, you are still required to have the free version of the plugin installed and activated. Why I don’t know as surely the premium version could have been self-contained.

As well as that if you are looking to use the Selling Ads addon, you’re required to install and activate Woocommerce – more on this later.

Initial Setup

Barring needing to have the free version installed and active, installing Advanced Ads is pretty simple and can be done via a manual upload like most plugins.

The settings are fairly detailed, especially with the addons active as they add to the settings.

General

These are the core setting and should be reviewed. They cover a wide variety of things from settings to beat ad blockers to disabling ads in different areas.

AdSense

As AdSense is one of the most popular ways to add adverts to a site, it makes sense there are specific settings for it.

Selling

Basic settings related to selling adverts.

Pro

Focusing on advanced features like cache busting, click fraud protection and lazy load.

Tracking

Advanced Ads provides some good stats and this settings area allows you to fine tune what you see and what’s tracked.

Creating Adverts

Adverts in Advanced Ads generally require three things: the advert itself, a group and a placement.

Placement

Placements set where the advert will be displayed and there are a lot of different options especially with all the addons active:

• Manual placement (shortcode or PHP code)
• Header area (code)
• Footer area (code)
• Before content
• After Content
• In Content
• Widget
• Header Bar
• Footer Bar
• Left/Right “Sidebars” attached to the content area
• Left/Right bars attached to the browser windows
• Background
• Random Paragraphs
• Above Headline
• Exact Middle of content
• Custom Placement
• Post Archives
• Popups

These placements will help you position your advert exactly where you want them to go and once set up can be used with any advert or group.

Groups

Groups are optional but are very handy for keeping adverts organized. They can also be set to randomize adverts or show a specific number of ads, amongst other features.

Adverts

Adding a single advert in Advanced Ads is simple yet can be a little bewildering when you first get started due to the sheer number of options available.

To begin with you can add a title and the type of advert to be shown. The types are quite straightforward with Plain Text and Image being the most commonly used.

The ad parameters section is where you’ll insert your add code, whether this is plain text or the JavaScript provided by services like AdSense. You can even insert PHP code.

The layout options allow you to tweak the placement by adding margins and alignment, and also to add specific IDs and Classes should you wish to make further changes via CSS.

The Display Conditions section allows you to target this advert based on numerous different options such as geolocation or what page the visitor is viewing. You can add multiple conditions giving you a very granular level of control which is excellent.

Finally there are stat related options specifically for the advert.

As I said earlier, there’s a lot going on when you create a new advert but most of it isn’t necessary for day to day advert creations. Minimizing the various sections helps but I feel like there are too many options shoved in front of you and some of these could be hidden better to help feeling like you’re wading through options.

Features

When it comes down to it most advertising plugins will have quite similar features, so expect to see a lot the usual when checking out Advanced Ads.

Some of the more unusual features include the following:

Ad Blocker Beating

Advanced Ads has a built in system that you can tweak to help get past ad blockers. After all you’re not going to make money if no one can see your advert.

AdSense Violation Warnings

When using third party advertiser networks, there’s usually a lot of rules and it’s often easy to fall foul of them.

AdSense is no different so Advanced Ads has an in built system to notify you if your adverts are going to cause issues, potentially saving you from having your account banned!

Visual Composer Compatibility

This isn’t the right place to weigh the pros and cons of page builder plugins, but if you use the popular Visual Composer plugin be assured that Advanced Ads will integrate with it.

AMP Ads

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google initiative to serve pared down versions of site to mobile users.

Being pared down means a lot of features on a site are removed. Advanced Ads does its best to make sure you AMP ready pages are also monetized with ads.

Addons

When you buy Advanced Ads you can just buy the core premium plugin and any addons separately, but it’s really good value to just buy the bundle of everything.

In this bundle you get the following add on plugins:

Responsive Ads

This addon allows you to set what size adverts appear at different screen resolutions, and even disabling the advert if needed.

While most themes will reduce the size of an image in order for it to be responsive, this might not be suitable from an advertiser’s point of view. Instead swapping it to a different size can provide a visible and therefore clickable advert.

This plugin also handles AMP adverts.

Geo Targeting

Allows you to show a specific advert or hide them for people coming from specific locations. This can be useful to target specific countries with country appropriate adverts.

PopUp and Layer Ads

One of the weaker Advanced Ad plugins, this addon allows you to add an advert or other content to popups. While this can be useful in that you can pop up any content and advertise on it, most existing popup plugins are more feature rich.

A VERY basic advert showing how you can add basic HTML and advertising code into a popup.

Selling Ads

This plugin allows you to sell advertising space on your site. It does a great job of making it easy to sell adverts because it is connected to Woocommerce.

That is also it’s down side. If all you’re doing is selling a couple of advertising space then having to install and set up Woocommerce as well as the advertising platform is a bit much.

If you already have Woocommerce installed and sell other products you also need to be aware that you’ll need to remove or separate the ads from other items on sale.

The requirement of Woocommerce aside, it really is quite simple to set up a product as the plugin integrates directly with Woocommerce.

There are a couple of other issues I had with the selling ads plugin.

First is a minor one: there was no simple link option. While most people might not need this, selling links for local businesses is fairly common and the Advanced Ads plain text option is simply not restrictive enough.

Secondly the Selling Ads plugin does nothing to the ads overview section. This means it can be quite difficult to find which adverts were purchased by which customers as you have to click the advert, and then click the link to go to the Order in Woocommerce.

You can go in via Woocommerce and click through to the order but it would have been nice to have been able to look at the advert list and see which adverts were for which customers.

Slider

This allows adverts to be shown in a slide show manner effectively rotating them. This is quite a useful feature as you can show multiple adverts in the same spot plus the movement attracts the eye. That being said it would have been nice if this was just built into the pro plugin itself rather than as a separate plugin.

Sticky Ads

Oddly enough this addon allows you to create adverts that stick in place even as the user scrolls. There are other features as well such as backgrounds and header/footer placements.

Support

Support for Advanced Ads is excellent. I had a couple of questions after I bought the plugin and sent them off on a Friday expecting to hear back Monday or Tuesday. Instead I got a response on the Saturday and even had an email conversation throughout the day.

Obviously that might not be typical but I also checked the WordPress.org support section and all questions have been answered and most of those were answered in less than 24 hours which is excellent!

Statistics

Selling or just using adverts on your site means you need statistics. After all there’s no point showing an advert if it doesn’t perform.

Advanced Ads stats section provides details on impression and clicks and is broken down by date and by advert so you can get a general overview or more specific data.

My only bugbear here is that the chart used is not responsive so smaller screens (even laptops) will need to scroll to see data.

Developer Friendly?

Advanced Ads has a basic codex on their website and has enough hooks, filters and functions to achieve most things.

It’s still not really easy to extend, but I found with some work it’s still possible – for example I managed to create a single link option for the plugin with a few hours of digging into the code.

As such it beats a lot of other advertising plugins simply by allowing you access to it on a code level.

The Bottom Line

Advanced Adverts is a solid advertising plugin with a heck of a lot of features and so many options you can fine tune things to your specific needs.

The bundle price for the premium plugin and addons is a reasonable €69 for a single site (about $82) and this includes support and updates for a year. There are more options that further improve the value such as 10 sites for €199 (about $234).

Usability wise, the plugin could be a little more streamlined and easy to use, with unnecessary or uncommonly used settings hidden away but that’s a minor point.

Most light users would likely get away with just using the free version, but those that require more complex setups or more control (or those simply wishing to support the developer) should pick up the Pro version as it definitely adds those advanced features.

My only real gripe is the required integration with Woocommerce in order to sell adverts. Yes it makes it easier to use an existing and popular ecommerce site, but not everyone will want to add a full blown ecommerce system in order to sell a few adverts. It would be nice to see a simple in built sales system in the future.

The question you most likely have is: does it do what I want it to? The answer would be yes. Advanced Ads built in features will cover pretty much any eventuality and if you’re looking for an advertising platform plugin for your site you should definitely consider this plugin.