Sponsors, banners and AdSense

Two screens under Monetization in the admin sidebar fill ad space with no payment passing through your board. Sponsors is for deals you arrange yourself, by email and invoice: you add the logo and say where and when it shows. Advertising is for an ad network's code, such as Google AdSense, and for banners of your own. Neither needs Stripe. Nothing shows on the site until you set it up here.

Selling the same spaces for money, with the advertiser booking and paying alone, is The advertising shop. Both can run together: When a paid order wants the same space says which one shows.

Add a house sponsor#

Open Monetization, then Sponsors. A sponsor added here is a house sponsor: you were paid some other way, or not at all.

1. 1

   Step 1: Click + Add sponsor

   A new card appears, with Active ticked.

2. 2

   Step 2: Fill in who they are

   • Sponsor name: required. It is shown in place of a missing logo on the home page, and beside the logo in a sidebar and on the stats pages.

   • Link (their website or offer): where a click goes. It opens in a new tab.

   • Tagline (optional): one line about them, up to 160 characters.

3. 3

   Step 3: Upload the logo

   Click Upload logo and choose an image file of up to 5 MB. It is shrunk to fit 400 by 120 pixels. Remove logo takes it off again.

4. 4

   Step 4: Set the dates

   Starts (optional) and Ends (optional, shows through this day). Leave both empty for a sponsor with no end. Outside its dates a sponsor hides by itself and comes back if you change them.

5. 5

   Step 5: Tick where it shows

   Under Where it shows, tick any of the four placements in the table below. A new card starts with the home page ticked.

6. 6

   Step 6: Click Save sponsors

   The bar at the bottom of the screen reads "Sponsors saved — live immediately." The mark beside Active reads Showing now, or Hidden if the sponsor is unticked or outside its dates.

You can keep up to 20 sponsors. Untick Active to rest one without losing it, or click Remove to delete it. Saving with an unnamed card answers "Every sponsor needs a name."

Where a sponsor shows#

Every sponsor ticked for a placement shows there together. The exception is the newsletter, which has room for one.

Add Google AdSense or another network#

An ad network gives you two things: a script that goes on every page, and a line for a file called ads.txt. Both go on Monetization, then Advertising.

1. 1

   Step 1: Copy your code from the network

   For AdSense, sign in to the AdSense site and copy the code snippet it gives you under Ads. The snippet contains your publisher ID, which looks like ca-pub- followed by digits.

2. 2

   Step 2: Paste it under Site-wide scripts

   Paste the snippet into Scripts in <head>, exactly as the network gave it.

3. 3

   Step 3: Paste the ads.txt line

   AdSense also gives you a line that looks like this, with your own publisher number in it:

   ads.txtCopy

   google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

   Paste it into the box under ads.txt, one line for each network.

4. 4

   Step 4: Click Save advertising settings

   The bar reads "Advertising settings saved — live immediately." The script is in the next page anyone loads.

The two script boxes behave differently:

• Scripts in <head>: only script, meta and link tags are used. Anything else in the snippet is left out. This is the place for AdSense, a tag manager's main script, an analytics script or a site verification tag.

• Scripts before </body>: put in exactly as typed, at the end of the page. Use it for anything the first box drops, such as the noscript part of a tag manager.

Each box holds up to 20,000 characters.

ads.txt#

What you type in the ads.txt box is served, as plain text, at the address ad networks look for:

https://your-domain.com/ads.txt

While the box is empty that address answers "Not found". Open it in your browser after you save to check the line is there.

Ad units#

The site-wide script loads the network. An advert itself is an ad unit: something you create once and then place. Under Ad units, click + Add ad unit, give it a name and choose its kind.

A banner image can be up to 5 MB and is shrunk to fit 1200 by 400 pixels. Ad code can be up to 10,000 characters. You can keep up to 12 units, and each needs a name: saving without one answers "Every ad unit needs a name."

Wherever a unit shows, it sits under the small word "Advertisement". A unit you have not placed shows nowhere. There are three places to put one:

• one of the three sitewide placements, below

• an Ad slot section on the home page, under Appearance, then Homepage

• an Ad slot widget in a sidebar, under Appearance, then Sidebars

The three sitewide placements#

Under Sitewide placements, each of three lists chooses one of your units, or — Off —.

Top and bottom show on every public page. They are left off the admin, the employer and job seeker dashboards, the sign-in pages, the setup wizard and the widgets other sites embed.

If you delete a unit that a placement still points at, the placement shows no advert. It does not break the page.

When a paid order wants the same space#

The shop sells the same spaces. This is what happens when an order you approved and something you set up here meet.

House sponsors do not use up the places you sell. If the shop offers four home page sponsors at once and you have three house sponsors ticked for the home page, seven logos can show.

The newsletter sponsor#

The weekly newsletter carries one line near the top: "This week's newsletter is sponsored by", the name, the tagline and the logo. A house sponsor with Newsletter ticked fills it when nobody has bought the Newsletter sponsor placement. If several are ticked, the first on the Sponsors page is used. The sponsor is chosen at the moment an issue is drafted, not when it is sent: The weekly newsletter has the detail, and the switch that turns the line off.