More often than not we will prefer not to show Ads on all posts in the Home Page (or any other archive listing page).   Suppose you are displaying ten posts on your Home page and you have an Ad block above your post content, this will bombard the user with 10 Ad blocks. You might also have Ads in the sidebars or other parts of the theme. A lot of Ads is always distracting to the users and ruins the visitor experience. A lot of ad blocks also mean more opportunity for Advertisers to display their Ads meaning they will have to bid less for an Ad spot thus lowering you CPC (Cost per Click).  Apart from this Google Adsense limits the number of Ads per Page to 3 Ad Units and 4 Link Units and if you add more Ad units to your pages it will appear as blank Spaces in the site.

I receive a lot of Emails complaining the appearance of blank areas where the Ads are supposed to appear.  The reason for this is either you are using a brand new Adsense code which is not active yet or you are displaying more Ads than what Google allows.  You can easily limit the number of Ad blocks in the Home page (or any other archive listing pages) using Wp-Insert; just follow the steps described below.

This tutorial is written assuming you are trying to control the Ad Block above Post Content but easily extends to any other Ad block.

Step 1 : Open the corresponding Admin page in the Wp-Insert Admin area; In our case this Wp-Insert -> Manage Inpost Ads -> Ad – Above Post Content.

Step 2 : Open the Rules tab.

Step 3 : Pick the page type you are trying to control; In our case its the Home Page. You will see an option named Instances.  Advanced users can directly type in the Instances you want the Ad to be hidden, other earthlings can click the selector Icon to Display the “Instances Popup”.

Step 4 : If you have configured your site to display 10 posts in the Home page you will see 10 options in the Popup, namely “Hide on 1st Post”, “Hide on 2ndPost” and so on.  Click the Plus button against the options you want and they will appear in the Left section.  You can also remove previously selected items by clicking the minus icon in the left section.

Step 5 : Click the Ok icon when done and Click “Save Changes” to save and Apply the Changes.

Now if you check the Home page (or any other archive listing page you picked) you will see that the Ads appear only against the instances you picked in the Backend.   As far as I know Wp-Insert is the first free WordPress plugin to implement this Awesome feature.