AdSense Tips & Tricks
Setting Up an AdSense Account and Getting Through Site Review
Lesson 4 of 5 ·
The application itself is short. The review is where sites stall. Here is the sequence as Google documents it, and where people get stuck.
1. Sign up
Go to the Google AdSense site and sign up with a Google Account. You will provide your site URL, your country, and your payee details. Note the country you select determines your payments terms and it cannot be changed later.
If you publish on Blogger, YouTube or another host partner, do not use this route — sign up through that product instead, since those follow a different process with their own eligibility thresholds.
2. Connect your site
Google will not review your site until it can confirm you control it. There are three accepted routes:
- Ad code snippet — paste the supplied snippet into the HTML of your pages, between the
<head>and</head>tags, on every page where you want ads. - `ads.txt` snippet — add the supplied line to an
ads.txtfile in your site's root directory. If you already have one, add the line to it. - Search Console verification — if Google detects that you have verified ownership of the site in Search Console, that can serve as confirmation instead.
The most common cause of a review that never seems to finish is that the code was placed on a page nobody visits. Google's documentation says this explicitly: publishers who wait a long time for activation usually have not placed the code on a page that gets regular views.
3. Wait for review
Google states that site review usually takes a few days, but in some cases 2–4 weeks. You can check the status on the "Sites" card of your AdSense homepage.
During review: keep the site live, keep it publicly reachable without a login, keep publishing normally, and do not remove the code. A site that is unreachable when the reviewer arrives fails on that alone.
4. If you are rejected
Rejection is not permanent and it is not a ban. Google tells you the reason category. The usual ones:
- Ad code missing or incomplete — the snippet is absent, malformed, outside the
<head>, or on a different site than the one you applied with. - Site unreachable — wrong URL entered, site down, or login-protected.
- Not enough unique content / poor user experience — the substantive one. Fix the content, not the application.
- Policy violations — check the AdSense Program policies against your actual pages.
Fix the specific issue, then resubmit for review from the Sites card. Repeatedly resubmitting without changing anything wastes time.
5. Getting paid
Google's payments system has several separate thresholds, and they vary by reporting currency:
- Tax information — you may be required to submit tax details when you first sign in.
- Verification threshold — at a certain balance you must verify your identity and address. Google typically posts a PIN to the address on file, so it must be correct.
- Payment method selection threshold — a lower balance at which you can choose how to be paid.
- Payment threshold — the balance at which payout is issued. For accounts reporting in USD this has long been $100, but the value differs by currency and Google publishes the full table in its Payment thresholds help page. Check yours there.
Payments are issued monthly once the threshold is met and there are no holds on the account. Earnings below the threshold roll over.
6. After approval
Start conservative. Enable a small number of placements, watch RPM and — more importantly — watch bounce rate and page speed. Google's reporting will tell you what ads earned; only your analytics will tell you what they cost you in readers.
One useful next step
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