How to use Google Adsense ? An ultimate guide

Are you having trouble getting your adsense approval for your site ? Or are you not able to show ads properly in your site after getting your approval? If so, this post is for you.

I will be sharing my experience with you, and hopefully give you some helpful tips you should know. I will also talk about the very important practices you should follow, while working with adsense.

What is google adsense ?

Google adsense is a program run by google. It lets websites owners to show advertisement in their site and earn through it. It is free to use. All you need to do is make your adsense account and submit your website url to them. Google will analyse your site and will let you show ads IF certain criterias are met.

If you are a little bit familiar with it, you probably must have seen that adsense, unfortunately doesn’t have a very clear description. They do have different helping pages like this one, explaining what you should do and what you should not, but none of them seemed very easy to understand(in my opinion).

How to get adsense approval ?

I struggled a lot to get my Adsense approval. And I admit its hard to get one.

And I think the only reason it is hard, is because google doesn’t have a very comprehensive detail about the criterias of adsense approval in any of their forums or articles. IF they had, it would have been easier.

But it won’t be for you , if you know them already. Here are the best(proven by most) practices to get adsense approval :

1. Make your site authentic – make it look clean, have a good navigation to help users explore stuff. Dont make it look lousy.
2. Add valuable content. Try to add as many things as you can. Like In my site, I had more than 30 blog posts.
3. Add a privacy policy page siting things like – what you do with the data users give you? if it can be used by children or not? You can use a privacy policy generator like this one. Gonna save you time.
4. Add an ABOUT US page
5. Add a Contact us page.
6. Don’t post illegal content – Like pornography or pirated things.
7. Create a google analytics, console and adsense(of course) account.
8. Create a sitemap and submit it to your google console. A sitemap is basically a list of all pages of your site. If you are using wordpress, seo plugins like rankmath and aioseo will do that for you. The real need of sitemap is to let google know the structure of your site and also to tell you if the pages are capable of being shown on the results or not, this is called indexing. So having less indexed pages is a problem too.

NOTE : IF you are from India, Pakistan or China, there is no need for your domain to be 6 months old or something. Just telling because in some old forums, people used to ask this. Maybe this was a rule before, but its probably removed now. As I got approval when my domain was 5 months old. It is also not important for you to have some organic traffic already.

At last just know, that the approval is on google’s hands. No one knows how they actually do it. They rejected my site for like 6 times before approval. All you can do is try.

But if you follow the steps above you get 95.69 % chances of getting your approval. As it has been seen by most.

Remember, If you violate any of the following steps, even after you have got your approval , your site can get removed from this program.

How to display ads after getting adsense approval ?

If you have got your approval, then congratulations. Once you get in, you will be shown you earning (which would be 0 $ at first, of course) in your home page. Something like this one.

You can see how ads are going to appear on your site, in the ads page. There are basically 3 kind of ways you can put ads on your site.

1. Auto Ads
2. Manual Ads
3. AMP ads

Lets see what they are and how you should use them

Auto ads

By default, you will have auto ads on. Enabling auto ads Auto ads would basically let google put ads on your site where ever it’s machine learning algorithm thinks is the best.

It usually places ads on the places where it might result in the best revenue. And I think it is really great.

Pros of auto ads

• It really eliminates the need of you to put ad codes every where.
• Its algorithm decides the best places for your ads to be.
• Its algorithm also analyses how your revenue could be maximum.
• It lets you chose pages where you don’t want your auto ads to appear at all.

Cons of auto ads

• It makes your site look spammy.
• You have little control over your ads.
• As of today, auto ads algorithm does have some a problem in recognizing dropdown menus specially in mobile phones. They sometimes place ads where dropdowns are supposed to be drop down. This causes the ad to completely overlap the content.

Manual ads

Manual ads lets you to generate ad code and place the code where ever you want to in your site.

These are different types of manual ads and their function. Display ads normally works everywhere.

Pros of manual ads

• It gives you full control over how and where your ads can appear.

Cons of manual ads

• It might make your work a little bit stressful as you need to put every ad code manually. It might be possible your site has a lot of pages , or a lot of complicated pages, and putting ad code everywhere yourself might not be very easy task.

AMP ads

AMP is a framework which makes your site faster.

If your site has amp, enabling this option will put will put on those pages automatically. This is very similar to auto ads.

The best way to display adsense ads

The best way to display ads on your site is by using the combination of auto, manual and amp ads. In auto ads settings, try to use anchor ads only. There are also in-page and vignette ads which I don’t really recommend. Specially vignette ads, as they appear whenever you are switching to one page to the other.

As I also mentioned, the in page ads found, in auto and AMP ads do have a problem with dropdowns. In my mobile site, there was a dropdown used as menu. in-page AMP and auto ads used to overlap the dropdown. And that was of course a really big problem. If you don’t face such problem, then you should consider using them, and if you face such problems too, try turning them off, both in amp and auto ads.

You should also use manual ads. Try placing manual ad codes on the things which appear on most of your site pages. Like a sidebar which appears in every post.

If you have turned of ‘in page’ ads, you will probably not get any ads in between your content pages. Now you can place manual ad codes there too, but putting code in every content page might not be an easy task. Specially if you have a blogging site where other people can post too.

If you are using wordpress, there are plugins you might consider to do this job like the advanced ads plugin.

Conclusion

These were my advices and experience I shared with you. And I think the best way to get better with adsense, or anything, is giving it time youself.

Of course there are many things which aren’t covered in this post. Like CPC, RPM etc. But the objective of this post, was to give you an idea of how you can get started with google Adsense. We discussed –

• The best practices one should consider for adsense approval.
• The best ad settings you should consider.

I hope you liked this post. I would also love to see your feedbacks on the comments below.