My Engineering Manager, Ivan Lopez, turned me on to the Google Publisher Console last week, which gives you a nice way to debug Google DFP ad placements.
It’s simple to use, simply ad ?google_force_console to a URL that’s using DFP and Google will automatically load a nice inspector to see what data is being used to generate the ads on a site.
Rather than having to manually add this query argument to a page, I went ahead and wrote a quick WordPress plugin to do it for me. The plugin is simple: after you install it and activate it, a “Google Ad Console” button will be added to the WordPress Admin Bar when you’re logged into your site (the link only appears on the front-end of your site, as you’re probably not running ads in wp-admin). Click it once, and the current page is reloaded with ?google_force_console in the URL. Click it again, and it’s gone.
The plugin is currently available for download through WordPress.org. If you’d like to contribute, development of the plugin happens on GitHub.
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