WordPress- Display Google Adsense After 1st Paragraph Tag

I’ve been playing around with Google Adsense a lot lately- in particular trying to find out where the ads are best placed on a WordPress Blog to maximise click through rates (CTR). I’ve been looking at some wordpress plugins, but I couldn’t find any that allowed me to display an ad unit after the first paragraph, or even second, third or forth..etc.

So I wrote some code which allowed me to do exactly that. In the single.php page, replace the following code:

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<?php the_content(); ?>

With…

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<?php
$show_after_p = 1;
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content);
if(substr_count($content, '<p>') > $show_after_p)
{
	$contents = explode("</p>", $content);
	$p_count = 0;
	foreach($contents as $content)
	{
		echo $content;
 
		if($p_count == $show_after_p)
		{
		?>
                INSERT ADSENSE CODE
		<?
		}
		echo "</p>";
		$p_count++;
	}
}
?>

That code will automatically display your Adsense unit after the first paragraph. You can modify $show_after_p = 1, which will control which paragraph you want the unit to display after.

If the $show_after_p value exceeds the amount of paragraphs there are in a post, the ad unit won’t display.

If anyone knows a better solution, please let me know. And if anyone decides to use the code, let me know if it works for you.