Athenian SiteAds
product details.
Athenian SiteAds adds onsite advertising management to WordPress and WooCommerce with placements, impression and click tracking, CPM or CPC pricing, and billable campaign workflows. It helps teams turn storefront visibility into measurable promotional inventory for vendors, affiliates, sponsors, or internal campaigns while keeping data, permissions, and automation aligned with the broader Athenian Platform Ecosystem.
Athenian SiteAds is a lightweight onsite advertising and sponsorship plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce. It turns storefront ad space into measurable, trackable, and potentially billable promotional inventory directly inside the WordPress admin.
Instead of manually rotating banners through a page builder with no reporting, SiteAds gives merchants and marketplace operators a structured ad workflow. Admins can create SiteAd records, assign them to placement slots, render them with shortcodes, route clicks through tracked redirects, record impressions, calculate CPM or CPC campaign cost, and review daily campaign performance.
Each ad can use custom HTML, a remote image URL, a featured image, or a simple text fallback. Ads can link to a custom destination URL or a WooCommerce product permalink. Placement slots are managed through the ath_sitead_slot taxonomy, making it easy to render sponsored homepage blocks, sidebar ads, product-adjacent promotions, vendor placements, affiliate campaign banners, or internal merchandising promos.
For Athenian Platform environments, SiteAds connects naturally with WooCommerce, Athenian Affiliate Manager, vendor/dropship systems, OwlPay, and marketplace promotion workflows. When OwlPay is available, unbilled daily campaign rows can be converted into partner ledger debits for configured affiliates or vendors, giving sponsored placement programs a practical path from visibility to billing.
Onsite Ad Inventory
Turn Storefront Placement Areas Into Managed Promotional Slots
Athenian SiteAds adds native ad records, placement slots, shortcode rendering,
flexible creative output, tracked destinations, and admin-managed campaign
metadata for WooCommerce storefront promotions.
| Ad Layer | Operational Value |
|---|---|
| SiteAd Records | Manage onsite ads as dedicated ath_sitead records with title, image, campaign metadata, billing target, and pricing model. |
| Placement Slots | Group ads by the ath_sitead_slot taxonomy for homepage, sidebar, vendor, product, footer, or campaign placements. |
| Shortcode Output | Render specific ads or rotating slot-based ads with [ath_siteads]. |
| Flexible Creative | Render custom HTML, remote images, featured images, or text fallback content from the same ad record. |
- Render a single ad with
[ath_siteads id="123"]. - Render rotating slot inventory with
[ath_siteads slot="sidebar" limit="1" order="rand"]. - Support ad destinations through custom target URLs or linked WooCommerce product IDs.
- Use wrapper data attributes for tracking, billing context, and future integration surfaces.
Tracking & Reporting
Measure Impressions, Clicks, CPM/CPC Cost, and Daily Campaign Activity
SiteAds records ad impressions through a public REST endpoint, routes clicks
through tracked redirects, stores raw event rows, and rolls activity into
daily reporting tables for campaign review and billing.
Track rendered ad views through
ath-siteads/v1/impression
Route ad clicks through
/sitead/go/{ad_id}/ before redirecting
Accrue campaign cost through CPM, CPC, or fixed/no-event billing
| Tracking Layer | How It Helps |
|---|---|
| Event Table | Stores impression and click events with ad ID, billing target, event type, cost, user context, and hashed request signals. |
| Daily Rollups | Aggregates impressions, clicks, cost, billing status, and OwlPay ledger references by day and ad. |
| Dedupe Window | Uses a configurable cookie-based impression dedupe window to reduce repeated accidental impression charges. |
| Admin Reports | Shows recent daily campaign performance, billing targets, cost, billed state, and ledger references. |
- Supports CPM campaigns where impressions accrue
rate / 1000. - Supports CPC campaigns where each click accrues the configured rate.
- Stores IP and user-agent values as SHA-256 hashes instead of raw values.
- Adds a Today column to the SiteAds list table for current-day impressions, clicks, and cost.
Sponsored Placement Billing
Settle Vendor and Affiliate Sponsored Placement Costs Through OwlPay
SiteAds can assign each campaign to an affiliate or vendor billing target,
calculate daily campaign cost, and optionally convert unbilled rows into
OwlPay ledger debits through WP-Cron or WP-CLI.
| Billing Layer | Operational Purpose |
|---|---|
| Billing Targets | Select affiliate records from aam_affiliate or vendor records from ab_vendor. |
| Daily Billing | Process unbilled daily rows with cost greater than zero through the scheduled ath_siteads_bill_daily action. |
| OwlPay Debits | Create partner ledger debits using source type siteads and source IDs tied to day/ad combinations. |
| CLI Tools | Use wp siteads doctor and wp siteads bill for maintenance, diagnostics, and manual billing runs. |
Storefront attention becomes accountable inventory:
SiteAds gives Athenian commerce sites a practical way to package onsite
visibility as sponsored placements with tracking, reporting, and optional
affiliate or vendor settlement.
- Stores settings in
ath_siteads_settings. - Stores campaign metadata with the
_ath_siteads_meta prefix. - Writes debug logs to
wp-content/uploads/ath-siteads.logwhen enabled. - Builds toward budget caps, weighted rotation, conversion tracking, vendor dashboards, CSV exports, and Athenian Data Intelligence reporting.