Description
Create, manage, and validate your ads.txt and app-ads.txt from within WordPress, just like any other content asset. Requires PHP 5.3+ and WordPress 4.9+.
What is ads.txt?
Ads.txt is an initiative by the Interactive Advertising Bureau to enable publishers to take control over who can sell their ad inventory. Through our work at 10up with various publishers, we’ve created a way to manage and validate your ads.txt file from within WordPress, eliminating the need to upload a file. The validation baked into the plugin helps avoid malformed records, which can cause issues that end up cached for up to 24 hours and can lead to a drop in ad revenue.
Technical Notes
- Requires PHP 5.3+.
- Requires WordPress 4.9+. Older versions of WordPress will not display any syntax highlighting and may break JavaScript and/or be unable to localize the plugin.
- Ad blockers may break syntax highlighting and pre-save error checking on the edit screen.
- Rewrites need to be enabled. Without rewrites, WordPress cannot know to supply
/ads.txt
when requested. - Your site URL must not contain a path (e.g.
https://example.com/site/
or path-based multisite installs). While the plugin will appear to function in the admin, it will not display the contents athttps://example.com/site/ads.txt
. This is because the plugin follows the IAB spec, which requires that the ads.txt file be located at the root of a domain or subdomain.
What about ads.cert?
We’re closely monitoring continued developments in the ad fraud space, and see this plugin as not only a way to create and manage your ads.txt file but also be prepared for future changes and upgrades to specifications. Ads.cert is still in the extremely early stages so we don’t see any immediate concerns with implementing ads.txt.
Can I use this with multisite?
Yes! However, if you are using a subfolder installation it will only work for the main site. This is because you can only have one ads.txt for a given domain or subdomain per the ads.txt spec. Our recommendation is to only activate Ads.txt Manager per-site.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install the plugin via the plugin installer, either by searching for it or uploading a .zip file.
- Activate the plugin.
- Head to Settings → Ads.txt or App-ads.txt and add the records you need.
- Check it out at yoursite.com/ads.txt or yoursite.com/app-ads.txt!
Note: If you already have an existing ads.txt or app-ads.txt file in the web root, the plugin will not read in the contents of the respective files, and changes you make in WordPress admin will not overwrite contents of the physical files.
You will need to rename or remove the existing (app-)ads.txt file (keeping a copy of the records it contains to put into the new settings screen) before you will be able to see any changes you make to (app-)ads.txt inside the WordPress admin.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Ads.txt Manager” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors“Ads.txt Manager” has been translated into 7 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Ads.txt Manager” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.3.0
- Added: Support for app-ads.txt filetype (props @helen, @westi, @p0mmy)
- Removed: Stop attempting to show an error notice about an existing
ads.txt
file due to too many false positives. We will bring this back later in a better way. - Changed: Bump WordPress version support to 5.4 (props @tmoorewp, @jeffpaul)
- Changed: Switched to using GitHub Actions instead of Travis for Continuous Integration (props @helen)
- Changed: Updated plugin screenshots and FAQs (props @jeffpaul, @helen)
- Fixed: Update capability check when saving ads.txt (props @eclev91)
1.2.0
- Added: Make revisions accessible in the admin – now you can restore older versions of your ads.txt or view how it’s changed over time (props @adamsilverstein, @helen)
- Added: Show a notice on the edit screen if an ads.txt file exists on the server (props @kkoppenhaver, @helen, @tjnowell, @adamsilverstein)
- Added: Add a custom
edit_ads_txt
capability for granular assignment, which is assigned to administrators by default (props @eclev91, @adamsilverstein) - Added: Enable filtering of the output using
ads_txt_content
(props @eclev91) - Changed: Updated documentation, automation, and coding standards (props @jeffpaul, @adamsilverstein, @helen, @mmcachran)
- Fixed: Early escaping (props @tjnowell)
- Fixed: PHPCS issues and added PHPCS scanning (props @adamsilverstein)
1.1
- Better error message formatting (wraps values in
<code>
tags for better readability) - WordPress.com VIP-approved escaping
1.0
- Initial plugin release