A Dead Simple Way To Rotate Ads

You’ll notice (please!) that I have a grid of four square ads on the top of my right-hand sidebar. I wanted to find a way of randomly rotating a number of different ads into those four positions. I don’t need anything fancy beyond that, and none of the WordPress plugins that I found really worked for me, so I decided to hack something up myself.

I’m using LinkShare.com to deliver these ads, but the following approach should work for any ad source.

First, let’s take a look at what my sidebar.php template looked like before. This code snippet shows where I had four ads hardcoded into specific positions. I’m calling the links ad1.html through ad4.html and the images img1.png through img4.png just as an example:

<a href="http://link.to/ad1.html"><img src="http://link.to/img1.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad2.html"><img src="http://link.to/img2.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad3.html"><img src="http://link.to/img3.png"></a>
<a href="http://link.to/ad4.html"><img src="http://link.to/img4.png"></a>

So to replace those four static ads with, say, six ads that rotate randomly through the four positions, I just replaced the above code with the following:

<?php
$ads = array(
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad1.html"><img src="http://link.to/img1.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad2.html"><img src="http://link.to/img2.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad3.html"><img src="http://link.to/img3.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad4.html"><img src="http://link.to/img4.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad5.html"><img src="http://link.to/img5.png"></a>',
  '<a href="http://link.to/ad6.html"><img src="http://link.to/img6.png"></a>'
);

shuffle($ads);
foreach (array_splice($ads, 0, 4) as $ad) { echo "$ad\n"; }
?>

And that’s it! Each time your sidebar is loaded it will randomly display four of your six ads in different positions each time. On my site I use WP Super Cache to improve performance, so you won’t actually see a different set of ads on the same page, but if you click to another page you’ll notice that the ads have refreshed.