Automating Pre-Roll Video Ads in WordPress with Elementor Widget Controls

I wanted a way to add pre-roll ads to Elementor videos without turning each page into a custom player integration. The problem was not video playback itself. Elementor already handles YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted sources well. The real pain point was ad insertion. Most setups bolt on another embed, shortcode, or script layer, which makes the editor messy and hard to maintain. Once multiple people touch the site, that usually leads to broken layouts or ad logic living far away from the actual video. I built this plugin to extend the existing Elementor Video widget instead of replacing it. Inside the widget controls, I add a dedicated Video Ads section where editors can enable a pre-roll clip, define skip timing, and optionally attach a visit URL. That keeps the ad configuration next to the main video source, which is where people expect to find it. Under the hood, the plugin works in two layers. The first layer is per-widget configuration stored with Elementor data, so each video can