Ad Dropper

Sell your own ads. Reward your subscribers with fewer of them.

Ad Dropper is the ad manager built for Leaky Paywall publishers. Place ads anywhere on your site, run campaigns the way your advertisers expect, and give the advertisers reports they can trust. Because it knows who your subscribers are, you can hide ads from paying readers and stop showing subscription offers to people who already subscribe.

Earn more from advertising. Run direct-sold campaigns from local businesses and national brands, with start and end dates, advertiser tracking codes and real reporting.

Make subscribing worth it. Offer an ad-free or ad-light experience by subscription level, and show your subscription offers only to people who haven’t subscribed yet.

Put ads where they work

• Ad zones for every position: header, sidebar, footer and in-content.
• Automatic in-content placement: before the article, after it, or after a set paragraph, so new posts get ads without editing each one.
• Target by section: show a zone only on certain post types, categories or tags, or hide it from them.
• Easy placement: add zones with a widget, a shortcode or the editor button.
• Any kind of ad: build ads in the WordPress editor (image banners, text, video or network ad code).
• Rotation: ads in the same zone rotate automatically.
• Per-article control: turn off all ads, or just in-content ads, on any single article.

Built for paying subscribers

• Ad-free by level: hide ads from subscribers on the levels you choose, for an ad-free benefit on a premium plan.
• No offers to people who already pay: hide subscription offers and newsletter sign-ups from readers who are already subscribers.
• One setting or per ad: set it once for the whole site, or ad by ad.

Run campaigns the way advertisers expect

• Start and end dates: schedule each ad by date and time in your site’s time zone. Ads start and stop on their own, so nobody has to remember to take a campaign down.
• Advertiser tracking codes: paste the click and impression tags from Google Campaign Manager 360 or any other ad server, exactly as the agency sent them. Ad Dropper adds a fresh cache-buster on every view, so the advertiser’s numbers stay accurate.
• Mistake check: Ad Dropper shows each tag’s Campaign Manager creative ID and warns you if the click and impression tags belong to different creatives. That’s the most common setup mistake, caught before the campaign goes live.
• Desktop and mobile versions: show an ad on desktop only, mobile only, or both. A desktop leaderboard and a mobile banner can share one zone, and each visitor sees the right one.
• Duplicate: set up one ad, copy it for each size or position, and change only the creative.

Reports you can send to an advertiser

Ad Dropper 2.0 counts the way the ad industry does:

• Impressions are counted only for ads actually displayed in a visitor’s browser.
• Viewable impressions are ads at least half on screen for one second, the industry standard.
• Bots are filtered out: search crawlers, uptime monitors and link previews aren’t counted.
• Clicks are recorded reliably through a secure redirect, before the visitor leaves your site.

Then see the results the way you need them:

• Date ranges: presets for today, yesterday, the last 7 and 30 days, this month and last month, or any custom range, with an option to compare against the previous period.
• Breakdowns: impressions, viewable impressions, viewability, clicks and click-through rate, by ad, by zone and by device.
• Live numbers: today’s figures update as they happen.
• Spreadsheet export: download any report as a CSV to share with an advertiser.

Works with page caching

Many publisher sites cache whole pages for speed, which usually freezes ad rotation and delays scheduled campaigns. Turn on Load Ads After Page Load, and Ad Dropper picks, schedules and counts ads for each visitor, even on fully cached sites. You can also reserve space for each zone, so the page doesn’t jump while the ad loads.

Who it’s for

Magazines, local news sites, trade publications and associations that run WordPress, sell some of their own advertising, and want subscriptions and ads to work together.

Questions

Does it work with ad networks like Google AdSense?
Yes. Paste the network’s ad code into an ad, assign it to a zone, and Ad Dropper handles placement, rotation and hiding from subscribers.

Can I use the tracking codes my advertiser’s agency sent?
Yes. Paste the click URL and impression tags into the ad’s Third-Party Tracking box. Image, iframe and script tags from Campaign Manager 360, Flashtalking and similar ad servers are supported.

My site uses page caching. Will ads still rotate and schedule correctly?
Yes. Turn on Load Ads After Page Load in Ad Dropper’s settings.

Do I need Leaky Paywall?
No, but Ad Dropper is part of Leaky Paywall Pro. The subscriber features, like ad-free levels and hiding offers from subscribers, use your Leaky Paywall subscription levels.

I upgraded from an earlier version. Why are my numbers lower?
Earlier versions counted a view every time an ad was rendered, including bots and ads that were never on screen. Version 2.0 counts only real, displayed impressions, so numbers from before the upgrade aren’t comparable. Ad Dropper reports flag this for any date range that includes older data.