Sell the space yourself, keep the sale

What BuySellAds is and who it suits

BuySellAds describes itself as a company that plans and runs campaigns for tech brands and their agencies, and works with publishers to place those campaigns. Its publisher page offers two routes: a dedicated sponsorship team for direct deals, and a curated network of independent publications.

It suits a publisher with a real audience who would rather not sell. Its site says it pitches your inventory, negotiates with sponsors and coordinates the campaign. Its publisher page also lists managed header bidding, an ad tag and API, and audience insights.

We read its home page and its publisher page before writing this. The statements about it here are its own wording. Its payout terms were not on the pages we read, so ask the vendor.

The real difference is who finds the advertiser

A marketplace or sponsorship service brings the buyer. That is the whole value, and it is worth a lot if you have no sales contacts. You give up some control over who advertises and how it is priced, and the vendor handles the commercial details.

WB Ad Manager brings no buyers. It gives you the tools to sell: a free inquiry form, ad placements and scheduling, and in Pro a portal with approvals and prepaid credits. You keep the relationship and the pricing. That is a better deal if buyers already know you, and a worse one if they do not.

A quick test helps. Count the sponsors who have contacted you without being asked in the last six months. If the number is zero, you have a demand problem, and a plugin will not fix it. If the number is more than a few, you have a handling problem, which is exactly what a portal, a queue and prepaid credits are for.

What we do not do

• We do not find, pitch or recruit advertisers.
• No insertion orders, contracts or invoices.
• No managed header bidding and no programmatic demand.
• No network of other publishers to bundle your inventory with.
• No audience research service for sponsors beyond the reports in the plugin.

Setting up your own sales, step by step

This is the Pro route, since the portal is what lets advertisers buy without emailing you. Steps that are free are marked.

1. Create the ad placements you want to sell and decide which ones advertisers may use. Placements are free.
2. In Pro, build packages. Each has a price, a pricing model, a duration and limits, and an option to require approval.
3. Put the advertiser portal on a page with its shortcode, link to it from your site, and decide whether new advertiser accounts are approved by you or automatically.
4. An advertiser tops up their wallet, builds a campaign from a package and submits it.
5. You approve or reject the campaign in the queue, and it goes live on its dates.
6. Watch spend and results. Free shows Impressions and Clicks, and Pro adds analytics.

Free: the starting point without Pro

The free plugin is enough to sell by hand. A sponsor emails you, you create an image ad, set a start and end date, assign a placement and give it a priority. A partnership inquiry form lets sponsors approach you from your site rather than by a mailto link.

What the portal does

The portal is a front-end dashboard with tabs for advertisers. They see an overview, their ads and campaigns, analytics, a wallet, a profile and messages. It runs from one shortcode. The advertiser never needs the WordPress admin.

How advertisers pay

Pro uses prepaid credits. An advertiser tops up a wallet, and a campaign draws from it as it runs. Top-ups go through direct Stripe or PayPal, or through billing you already run, which can be WooCommerce, its Subscriptions or Memberships, Paid Memberships Pro or MemberPress.

A campaign has a total budget and run dates, and spend is paced evenly across the days. A package can charge a flat price, a price per thousand impressions, a price per click, or impressions and clicks together. There is no per-role cap or daily limit setting. Advertisers get a receipt email when they top up, and a low-balance email when credit runs short.

The money goes to your own processor account or shop, and we found nothing in the plugin that takes a share of it. Payment processors charge their own fees. There are no invoices, and EDD is not a payment route.

Choosing a pricing model

Pick the model that matches how your sponsors think.

• Flat price: a sponsor pays one amount for a package, and the package carries its own duration.
• Per thousand impressions: suits advertisers who care about reach.
• Per click: suits advertisers who care about traffic, and puts the risk on your page.
• Impressions and clicks together: a mix, with limits on each.
• Approval on: the safest start while you learn what advertisers submit.

AdSense and other networks beside direct sales

If you sell directly, you probably also run AdSense in the gaps. The free plugin supports both in one placement. Each page view shows one of the ads in the slot, picked at random and weighted by priority from 1 to 10, with 5 as the default.

A direct campaign does not override AdSense. A sponsor at priority 10 next to AdSense at 1 gets about 91 percent of views. Scheduling decides whether an ad is in the pool at all, so AdSense has the slot alone before and after the sponsor’s dates. There is no unsold inventory logic and no fallback to a house ad.

A code ad can hold tags from other networks, such as Ezoic or Mediavine. BuySellAds lists a managed header bidding service, which an ad plugin does not do. See AdSense and direct ads together for a worked example.

What you can measure

Free shows Impressions and Clicks for each ad and a click-through comparison for ads in one slot. It has no Reports screen. Impressions count when the server renders the ad, so fully cached pages undercount.

Pro adds an Ad Analytics screen, revenue by placement, geo and device breakdowns and a CSV export. The Revenue screen shows what advertisers paid for ads and classifieds through the portal. Advertisers also see analytics for their own campaigns.

One practical point is the sponsor’s view. An advertiser who pays you directly wants proof that the ad ran. In Pro they can open the portal and see their own campaign numbers, and you can export the data to send them a report. In the free plugin, you would copy the counts from the All Ads list yourself.

BuySellAds lists campaign reporting and a separate audience product for understanding your readership. Those are aimed at making a case to sponsors, which is the part a plugin cannot do for you. Our numbers are your own counts, and sponsors may ask for more.

Disclosure and what the site owner must do

Sponsored space should look like it. The free plugin has an ad label setting, “Advertisement” by default, shown above or below the ad, and you set the text.

The plugin does not add rel attributes or disclosures automatically. If a sponsor’s link needs rel=“sponsored”, check the ad’s output and add it. A sponsored post or newsletter mention is not part of the plugin, and nothing writes the disclosure for you. Tell readers when something is paid, wherever it appears.

Controlling who advertises

Advertiser accounts begin as pending unless you switch on auto-approval, and each can be suspended or banned later. Campaigns can wait in the queue for your decision, and packages require approval by default. These are controls you hold, where a network decides for you. Use them with a written policy, because a queue with no rules becomes arbitrary.

Before you accept an advertiser, decide what you will not run. A moderation queue is only useful if you have a policy to apply. Write it down, link to it from the portal and apply it the same way every time.

What each costs to run, and where data goes

A marketplace usually costs you a share of what advertisers pay, or terms you agree with the vendor. We did not find payout terms on the pages we read, so ask before you sign up. Your time goes into the application and into the relationship.

WB Ad Manager costs a free core plus a paid yearly Pro licence, shown on the pricing page. Your time goes into finding advertisers, answering them and applying your policy. Hosting is yours.

On data, ads you upload as images are served from your own site. Country targeting sends the visitor’s IP to a geolocation service, with ip-api as the default. IPs stored by the plugin are anonymized with a daily-rotating hash, and we run no third-party pixels. With a network, ads load from the vendor, so read its privacy terms.

Moving over from BuySellAds

There is nothing to import. Your current sponsors are campaigns inside another service, and no importer exists for them. Rebuild each live sponsorship as an ad with its dates, size, destination and placement, or as a package in Pro if you plan to repeat it.

Tell sponsors before you change anything. Some contracts name a platform or a billing route, and a move may need their agreement. Run both side by side for a short overlap, then remove the old tag once the new ad is serving.

Launch checklist

1. Install the free plugin from the Wbcom Designs checkout.
2. List the placements you want to sell and the sizes they accept.
3. Create one ad for an existing sponsor and schedule it.
4. In Pro, build your first package and turn on approval.
5. Put the portal on a page and test a sign-up and a top-up with a small amount.
6. Write your advertiser policy, set the ad label text, and announce the page to the sponsors who have asked before.

Running beside the rest of the stack

WB Ad Manager is one of several separate plugins from the same team. They run on one WordPress site and one login, but you install, host and update each yourself.

The ones that matter to a seller are those that build an audience. BuddyNext is a community plugin, Jetonomy runs forums and Q&A, Learnomy sells courses, Listora is a directory, WP Career Board is a job board and WP Sell Services is a services marketplace. WB Gamification adds points and badges. BuddyX Pro and Reign are themes.

A publisher who owns a community, a directory or a job board has audiences worth selling against, and that is the case for pairing them. It is not a shared feature, and we make no claim that those products share data with the ad plugin.

The connections we can state are narrow. Free ad placements include spots for BuddyPress, bbPress and Jetonomy pages. Pro includes a BuddyPress integration that adds advertiser tabs to member profiles, posts activity when an ad is approved and sends notifications. For member-driven selling see the member self-serve platform use case.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Google Ad Manager wins when you have significant direct sales and want several exchanges competing for inventory.
• Advanced Ads is another WordPress ad plugin, and its page sets out when it is the better pick.
• AdSanity is compared on its own page for sites that sell banner space.
• AdRotate is a further plugin option with its own page.
• Ad Inserter is covered separately for sites that care about exact code placement.
• All alternatives lists every comparison on this site.

Who should stay with BuySellAds

Stay if you have an audience but no sales contacts. A plugin gives you tools to sell, and it does not give you buyers. If you cannot find advertisers yourself, a sponsorship team does something we cannot.

Stay if you want contracts, billing and campaign coordination handled for you. We leave all of that to you, with prepaid credits and a receipt email as the only paperwork.

Stay if your readers are the kind of tech audience its publisher page describes, and sponsors already look for you there. The reach of a network is not something a plugin replicates. If you later build a direct sales channel, the direct sponsor ads use case shows how it can sit alongside.

Stay, finally, if you are not ready to do the follow-up. Selling directly means replying to inquiries, agreeing dates, checking creative and chasing renewals. A plugin makes each of those easier, but none of them disappears. If that work would never get done, paying someone else to do it is the cheaper choice.

Look at your readers one more time before you decide. If sponsors in your field already ask where to advertise, the plugin route will feel natural. If you hear nothing from them, build the audience first and revisit the question later.