Customize Your Paper’s Ad Unit Widgets

Have you ever wondered how you can capitalize on the traffic being received by your paper, and in turn, redirect those visitors to your website? In addition to curating great content, one of the best ways to do that is to use custom Ad Units with your Pro paper.

Not familiar with Ad Units? With a Pro paper, you have the ability to turn off third party advertising and replace it with your own. These spots become powerful widget areas, with a variety of possibilities including many creative uses of HTML.

Let’s talk about 5 easy ways you can beef up your Ad Units. Visit your Paper Settings Dashboard, click Web newspaper > Layout & appearance, then Ad units. Click on any of the Ad Unit positions to get started.

Image in an Ad Unit

1. Image

The easiest way to get started is upload a simple advertising image; Ideally, it’s dimensions should be 300 x 250. Once you upload your image, be sure to include an “Image Link.” This will redirect anyone who clicks on it to an appropriate page on your website.

2. HTML: Embed a Video

Do you have a testimonial video you’d like to share? Embedding a YouTube video as one of your Ad Units is a great way to showcase it to your community.  The process is as easy as copying some code provided by youtube into one of the ad unit HTML slots.  The full instructions are found here.

3. HTML: Embed your Website (or Facebook feed)

You can also embed your responsive website using an iFrame. Stick with an iFrame with of no more than 350 pixels, although you’ll want to play around with the height to see what you like best. We recommend putting this in spot #2 so it’s after your Twitter feed.

You can iFrame your Facebook page feed as well, using our handy cheat sheet: Just replace “PageName” with yours.

Landing Page in an Ad Unit

4. HTML: Landing Page & Forms

Have you created a beautiful landing page on your website and want to share it with your readers? Simply copy the HTML from the page and paste it in. Be sure to include a remotely hosted image with the hyperlink redirecting your readers back to your landing page where they can fill out your form.

You can also put your form on a webpage with no styling, and iFrame in that page — this way, your form is already on the page.

5. Google Adsense

Already have a Google Adsense account? Simply paste in your Publisher ID and the Google Ad Unit number of your choosing.

These customizations will help your paper stand out, and drive more traffic back to YOU. If you haven’t upgraded to a Pro Paper yet, just sign in and click the Upgrade to Pro button today!

 

Embed codes:

These are the embed codes referred to in this post. The red font corresponds with where you’ll need to make modifications.

Website:
<iframe src=“http://WEBSITENAME.com”  width= “350” height=”700″ align= “left” </iframe>

Facebook:
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FPageName&amp; width&amp;height=558&amp; colorscheme=light&amp; show_faces=true&amp; header=false&amp; stream=true&amp; show_border=false&amp; appId=657332940973150″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; height:558px;” allowTransparency=”true”></iframe>

Kelly Hungerford
Kelly's a Digital Operations Specialist and Social Brand Strategist. She helps Startups and SMBs build lean marketing operations leveraging Social Media to support business goals and connect with the people who matter most. As former Head of Community and Communications for Paper.li, she was responsible for building community-centric operations to support Paper.li's rapidly growing user-base and founding #BizHeroes, Paper.li's Brand Twitter Chat that takes place Tuesdays at 2pm ET.

3 thoughts on “Customize Your Paper’s Ad Unit Widgets”

  1. Hi Kelly,
    my professional videos play on Vimeo, not Youtube – can I replace “youtube” with “vimeo” in the code?
    Thx,
    Fred

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