Advertise your content with Blaze

Advertise your content across WordPress.com, Tumblr, and beyond from as little as $5 per day. This guide will show you how to attract high-quality traffic to your website using Blaze.

Create a Blaze campaign to advertise a post or page on some of the millions of pages across WordPress.com, Tumblr, and more. Follow these steps to set up your Blaze campaign:

1. From your site’s dashboard, visit Tools → Advertising to view a list of your site’s posts and pages:

2. Locate the page or post you want to promote. At the top of the list, you can search by title, filter to only show posts or only pages, and sort your content by different criteria like recently updated or most viewed.
3. Click the “Promote“ button next to any piece of content to start creating your ad campaign.
4. Choose a campaign objective from traffic, sales, awareness, and engagement.
5. To continue with the default campaign created, click the “Submit campaign” button. To make edits to the appearance, audience, budget, duration, or payment, click the “Make changes” button.

Learn more about each section of your ad campaign in the sections below:

You can choose from the following objectives for your ad campaign:

• Traffic aims to drive more visitors and increase page views.
• Sales converts potential customers into buyers by encouraging purchase.
• Awareness focuses on increasing brand recognition and visibility.
• Engagement encourages your audience to interact and connect with your brand.

The “Appearance” section asks for three pieces of information to determine how your ad will look:

• Ad creative: Upload an image to represent your page or post. You can use the crop tool to adjust the appearance of your image in the ad.
  • There is no recommended image size because the image’s appearance changes based on where the ad appears. We recommend using a picture containing no words because the image may be cropped as it adapts to different devices. Use the ad preview on the right side as a guide.
• Title: This appears above your image as bolded text. You can write a maximum of 80 characters here. Use them wisely to capture the viewer’s attention.
• Snippet: A short text description that appears underneath your image. You can write a maximum of 160 characters here. We recommend using this text to support your headline and give viewers more context about what they will see when they click the ad and arrive at your content.

Click the arrows next to “Suggested by AI” to auto-generate ad text based on the content.

For the “Audience” section, you can choose who will see your ad by selecting from the following dropdowns:

• Language: Choose from 15 languages your content appeals to. You can select multiple languages here.
• Interests: Choose the interests of your intended audience. Select “All topics“ to show your post to all potential viewers regardless of their interests. You can select multiple interests here.
• Location: Choose geographic areas where your campaign will be displayed. You can narrow down your audience by entering your desired location(s). You can type countries, states, and cities or leave the field blank to show your post to all potential viewers, regardless of location.

As you adjust your settings on this screen, your ad summary will reflect your choices and provide the estimated impressions for your campaign (i.e., the number of times your ad will be shown).

In the “Budget and duration” section, you can control how much you would like to spend on your campaign:

• Schedule: You can run the ad until you decide to stop it or specify a number of days between 1 and 28 days.
• Start date: Select when you would like your campaign to start running.
• Total: Drag the slider up or down to choose your spend. USD is the only currency supported at this time.

Under Advanced Settings, you will find the following options:

• Targeted Devices: Choose if you want your post to be seen by viewers on desktop computers or mobile devices. Select “All devices” to show your post to all potential viewers regardless of their device.
• Destination URL: Choose where the viewer arrives upon clicking the ad: either to the original post or page you selected, or to your website’s homepage.
• URL parameters: Add URL parameters for tracking and analytics.

When setting up your first campaign, you’ll fill out your card details for payment. You won’t be charged until after the ad has been approved and starts running on our network of sites.

Payments will be made automatically weekly, based on delivered impressions over that period (i.e., how many times your ad was served). You can track the performance of your campaign while it is running.

You will be charged weekly for ads served across all of your promotions. If your account exceeds the maximum allowed outstanding balance before the one-week billing cycle, your card may be charged earlier. Limits are dynamic and depend on your total paid amount and other risk factors.

With Blaze, your budget goes towards a set number of impressions. An impression happens each time your ad is shown to someone. Other ad platforms use a “cost per click” basis, where you pay every time someone clicks, but you don’t always have as much control over how often or how broadly your ad is shown. Blaze uses a simpler model: you simply pay to show your ad and don’t pay more if more people click on it.

Setting a budget of $5 per day for 7 days does not mean your campaign will cost $35. Instead, the budget sets a maximum cost based on your estimated impressions. The actual spending may be less than your budget as it depends on the number of impressions that were actually served rather than the initial estimate.

If you have Blaze Credits, they will always be used first before charging your card.

When a payment is made, you will receive an email receipt to the email address associated with your WordPress.com account.

If a payment fails, we may suspend all active ads and deny the start of new ones until the debt is settled. You will be notified by email with payment links to resolve the outstanding balance.

You can cancel your campaigns at any time. You will only be charged for the portion of your campaign that has already been served up until that point.

It is not possible to refund any charges for ads that have already been displayed, so make sure to set your budget to an amount you are willing to pay.

You can remove a credit card from Blaze in the Payment Methods section of your WordPress.com account. For further assistance with Blaze payments, contact support.

We review all Blaze campaigns to ensure compliance with our advertising policy before others see them.

To ensure your ad is approved, please also ensure that:

1. You have added a domain to your site.
2. Your website is publicly accessible.

We try to moderate ads as soon as possible, but ads take at least 24 hours to be reviewed. This timeline may change depending on how much content we need to review.

If your ad has been approved, you will receive an email saying that it has been approved and will be put online. Your post will be rejected if it does not conform to our Advertising Policy. You will not be charged if your post is rejected.

In advertising, an “impression” refers to each time your ad is displayed to visitors on a given webpage. As you adjust your budget and targeting choices, you will see an estimate of how many people you will reach with your ad. This is shown in the Estimated impressions section on the right side of the “Budget and duration” section of the ad campaign editor:

Campaigns are paid on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. CPM is an acronym for cost per mille (mille is a Latin/French word for thousand). This means your campaign will be charged for every 1,000 times your ad is displayed.

However, it’s worth understanding that these impressions do not guarantee visitors will click on your ad. As with most forms of marketing, the best results will depend on capturing your target audience’s interest in the moment. Take care to craft an ad that resonates with the audience you are trying to reach.

It’s important to balance your reach with the relevancy of your content to your audience. This will help maximize the number of clicks your ad receives and, ultimately, the traffic the ad produces for your site. If you’re unsure what to select for your budget, we suggest starting at $5 per day over 7 days and growing from there based on your results.

Your ad campaign will appear across the network including Tumblr and free WordPress.com sites with an ‘Advertisement’ label.

Please click here for information on our accessibility practices.

For more information, please review our Advertising Policy and Terms of Service.