Google AdSense is one of the most convenient ways of displaying advertisements on your website, and is especially favored amongst website owners and bloggers. As AdSense is provided on behalf of Google, there is very minimal risk involved with payments, and you don’t have to worry about your ads being tracked properly.
AdSense offers two types of ads: text and image. Text ads are just links with an additional description, while image ads can be plain images and/or animated images. As you might imagine, image ads will pay significantly more. To be considered for Google AdSense approval, you do have to take into consideration several precautions.
Criteria for Being Approved on AdSense
The Google AdSense approval process isn’t difficult, and as long as you’re not trying to get Google AdSense approved on a site that lacks content, is blacklisted or sells adult material, there usually should be no problem whatsoever.
1. Content You want to make sure that before you apply for Google AdSense you have some sort of content already published on your site/blog. Ideally, you want anywhere from 30 to 50 posts that are of good quality and aren’t direct copy/paste from other parts of the web. The more rich your content is, the easier it is to get accepted.
2. Design Google AdSense approval is all about the quality of your website, which means that you should always make sure that your website design is clean and easy to navigate. You don’t necessarily have to invest in a premium theme either, but it helps to have a style that reflects colors that work with each other, as well as provides a user experience that’s welcoming.
3. Policies One last thing to note is that Google AdSense usually will require of you to have the following pages on your site:
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Usage
- EU Cookie Law
Make sure that you investigate each more specifically so that you understand what they mean, you only have to do it once, and this could often be the reason why someone is denied their AdSense application, because these pages are not appearing anywhere.
How to add AdSense Code using a plain WordPress Text Widget
Once approved, you will be presented with the Google AdSense dashboard and the ability to create new ads based on your requirements. A quite convenient and easy way to display Google AdSense on your WordPress website is by simply putting the ad code into a plain text widget and placing it in a favored widget area. For our premium WordPress themes, we have especially implemented several widget areas for advertisements.
The WordPress text widgets will then display the Google AdSense ad code you have added and the ads will be delivered based on the content of your site and the user behavior. So if you have a site about cars, it’s very likely that you’ll see ads for car rental services, car insurance or other related advertisements.
By the way, we have implemented additional “Advertising Options” for the MH Magazine WordPress theme which allows you to automatically display ads within the content of your posts and on archives. For more information on that, please see: How to place ads in your WordPress theme.
Display Google AdSense by using the Advanced Ads plugin
Another way to integrate Google AdSense ads into your WordPress website is to use the Advanced Ads plugin Advanced Ads plugin.
After installing Advanced Ads, you can connect your website to your Google AdSense account and import all ads from your account with one click.
Set more details of your AdSense ad unit, such as the size, margins, or alignment, in the ad options. Advanced Ads can automatically convert your ads to an AMP-compatible format, and therefore, you can specify their size or maximum height on AMP pages too.
You can now automatically insert the imported AdSense ads into the content of your website. If this is your first time using Advanced Ads, this tutorial will explain how to create ads and embed them into your website.
If you don’t want to manually manage and insert your AdSense ads, you can also embed automatic ads from AdSense with Advanced Ads. This option also includes automatic ads on AMP pages.
Other features of the Advanced Ads AdSense integration
Besides importing your created ads, Advanced Ads will also show all notifications from AdSense and the revenues of your account in the dashboard.
Another helpful feature is the automatic creation of the ads.txt file, which is necessary for using Google AdSense. Provided you have connected your website to your AdSense account, Advanced Ads will import the required entry and create the ads.txt file for you.
The following video shows how easy it works.
Common Google AdSense Problems
Google AdSense is a professional advertising platform, so it tries to stick to the rules wherever possible. You might experience this in many different forms, so here’s a list of the most common Google AdSense problems that webmasters may encounter when using AdSense.
1. Low Earnings
Any website has a specific niche it works from, so there is never guarantee that your content is going to yield big and expensive clicks. The other thing is ad placement, how you position your ads to engage user activity on them. One of the most important steps to take when starting AdSense is to test every possible situation and placement, so that you can gather data on what works with your visitors and what doesn’t.
2. Ads Not Displaying
Sometimes you might have to deal with issues such as blank ads, or ads not showing up at all. Here’s a checklist to verify any potential issues:
- Wait up to 48 hours: It takes up to 48 hours for Google to verify newly placed ads, don’t rush to quick judgements before getting verified.
- Offer quality content: Ads must be placed on pages with content in order to show up properly, so make sure your site offers unique, quality content.
- Find & eliminate obstacles: Check if you’re running an AdBlocker, or find out if the CSS of your theme is blocking ads from showing up on your website.
- Compliance of your content: Always make sure that your content is fully compliant with AdSense terms.
Other than that there should be no issues with getting your Google ads to work.
Notable Alternatives to Google AdSense
AdSense is certainly a huge advertising network, and many webmasters love it because of its simplicity, but sometimes it’s worth looking into alternatives as they might provide better revenue rates for the niche that you’re working with.
- Adversal — Adversal is an ad network providing pop under and banners advertising for advertisers. They have high quality publishers mostly from the two countries US and UK.
- MediaNET — MediaNET combines both Yahoo! and Bing for a powerful combination of advertising potential, whilst providing a privately-funded publisher platform that’s home to hundreds of advertisers.
The ways to advertise online are always growing, and ad networks are just a tiny part of the solution. Sponsored content, product sales, affiliate marketing are just amongst the few of the many names that you may come across when exploring web advertising.