Google says “Turn your passion into profit. AdSense is a free, simple way to make money online by placing ads on your website.” How hard is it to setup Google AdSense on your WordPress site?

First, you will need to create a Google AdSense account here and add your site to Google AdSense. Don’t forget to add your account and payment type here.

You will need to add a bit of HTML script from Google to your site to verify you own the domain you are adding ads too.  Lucky for me my theme Genesis allows me to paste code straight into the header and footer sections for my site.

Google AdSense steps are quite clear and will let you know what you need to do (I monitor this from my phone).

After your site is verified (automatically) you will have to wait up to 1 week for Google to review your site. You will receive an email when Google has approved your site.

Then you are ready to log in to Google Adwords page and create an Advertisement style that matches your site. Now you can create your first ad type in the Google AdSense screen.

I created a “Text and Display Ads”.

I then entered a name and chose “Automatic Size” and “Responsive”, feel free to add your own colors here and customize.

From the Google Adsense page go to My Ads, Content then Ad Unit, Now you can click get the code.

I can use this code to place auto responsive ad’s on my web pages.

I should have embedded this code into my WordPress theme but I decided to place the code manually into each of my posts (in text mode).

This is how a Google AdWords Ad looks in this post (below the first paragraph).  Very smart that Google chose to serve an AdWords company Ad in my post about Google Ad Words.

Here are my earnings 10 minutes after adding my first ad to my blog ($0 as expected).  I plan on using any revenue to speed up this website as the host is very slow.

If you like this post please click my Ad’s.  I will update my revenue numbers here in the future.

Thanks to Emma who runs a great blog and encouraged me to blog years ago and big thanks to my wife Alison who ran a blog for years (way before me with loads more visitors).

Payment

It appears you can’t add a payment method or add a payment method until you reach $100 earned.

It looks like earnings will be paid monthly if you meet the target. Payment placeholders are available at https://play.google.com/store/account#  I guess new payment methods can be added here.

AdSense Mobile app.

I use the AdSense mobile app

FYI: For me, Estimated revenue on the mobile app is in Australian dollars and estimate revenue at https://www.google.com/adsense/ is in USD.

Searching reveals that estimated revenue will be evaluated at the end of the month and the final amount will be reduced.

Content

Make the content relevant to the reader to gain revenue. I guess I need to look at Google Analytics and blog more of what people want.

SEO

Don’t forget to ensure your sites SEO is working as expected. Also, a slow website will have poor SEO  so consider a faster private VM from Vultr or Digital Ocean.

Ad Glossary

• Page RPM – Page revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views you received, then multiplying by 1000.
• Page CTR – The page click through rate (CTR) is the number of ad clicks divided by the number of page views.
• Impression CTR – An impression is counted for each ad request that returns at least one ad to the site. It is the number of ad units (for content ads) or search queries (for search ads) that showed ads.
• Cost Per Click – The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they’re advertising.
• Impression RPM – The impression revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) is the average earnings per one thousand impressions.
• Page ROM – Page revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views you received, then multiplying by 1000.
• Coverage – Coverage is the percentage of ad requests that returned at least one ad. Generally, coverage can help you identify sites where AdSense isn’t able to provide targeted ads.
• Maximum CPC Bid – A bid that you set to determine the highest amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad.
• CPM Bid (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) – CPM bidding means that you pay based on the number of impressions (times your ads are shown) that you receive on the Google Display Network. Starting this year, CPM bidding will be replaced by viewable CPM bidding.

How costs are calculated in AdWords.

Read the Google AdSense Glossary and help here.

Ad Sense Rules

Ad Sense Beginner’s Guide – Stay compliant with our policies.

Summary:

1. Don’t click your own ads.
2. Don’t ask others to click your ads.
3. Don’t include any prohibited site content, including adult content, violence or excessive profanity, drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) or copyrighted material.
4. Don’t modify the AdSense code.
5. Do follow our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.
6. Do provide a good user experience.
7. Don’t place more ads than content on any page.
8. Don’t place images near ads in a way that may mislead users into thinking that the images are associated with the ads.

Google Webmaster guidelines.Payment

Payment

You will be unable to receive payment until you verify your address.

If you are on a 14-day free trial you will need to setup billing before the trial expires

Tips

• Do add the show ad’s code to WordPress over manually adding to pages or posts.
• You can only add one script to your page once (e.g Header or Footer (not Both)) or multiple ad banners will be visible and only one will be clickable.

Bonus

Read my guide on managing WordPress via the command line where I automatically (with one command line added the word Advertisements) to over 80 post and pages.

sudo wp search-replace '<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com' 'Advertisement:<br /> <script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com'
sudo wp search-replace '<script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com' 'Advertisement:<br /> <script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com'

Update June 2019

Google is now demanding you add a /ads.txt file to your site (with this format).

I added the following to mine

google.com, pub-9241521190070921, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

I used this site to validate my ads.txt file

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Draft: v1.91 June 2019 ads.txt info