Got Accepted Into AdSense. How To Setup Ads On My Blog

By Simonne on Feb 3, 2008 under AdSense, Make money online

Congratulations! Google accepted you in the AdSense program. Now you have to set up your ads and start making some money. Before learning how to do this, remember the following:

You can display ads on any site you want from now on. Once you got accepted, you are an AdSense publisher and there is no need to ask for approval to display ads on other websites than the one you submitted with your initial application.

In order for AdSense ads to be displayed on your blog, you need to insert a piece of code in your blog’s code. You can either do this manually, or, you can use a plugin (option valid only for Wordpress self hosted blogs, namely blogs set up on your own domain, using Wordpress install).

I use AdSense Deluxe plugin, but this is not the only one. Here you are 10 best Wordpress plugins for AdSense. Although this article is more than one year old, it is still useful. Only ignore the plugin called AdSense Beautifier, which does not comply anymore with Google’s terms of service for AdSense (AdSense TOS).

The code is automatically generated by Google, after you choose the ads blocks type, size, or color.

Types of ad units: Standard Ad Units and Link Units.

Setting up an AdSense ad unit

Check the Ad Unit radio button, in order to generate the code for standard units (you can see from the picture above how the two different types of units look like).
By opening this menu (see picture), you’ll have the possibility to select what kind of ads you want your unit to display: the default setting is for both image and text ads, but you can choose to have only text ads or only image ads, if so you wish.
After you made your selections, click on Continue, and you’ll be taken to another selection screen:

Choosing AdSense ad unit format and colors

Click to open the selection menu for the ad format. For better understanding, see the ad formats here.
Click to open the Palettes menu. Choose any of them, to see how they work.
Here you can see how your ad looks like. This sample is updated when you pick a different palette, or a different format.
If you choose Multiple Palettes, your website will display your ads in different colors with every browser refresh.Some people recommend this option in order to avoid your visitors developing ad blindness. Personally, I didn’t see the benefits, but each of you should run his own tests, because every blog is unique, and even tiny changes can lead to significantly different results.
If you chose your ad unit to have a border, you have the possibility to select the corners style: square, rounded, or very rounded. If you don’t want a border, you just select for it the color of your blog’s background.
Sometimes Google’s inventory does not include any ads to match your content. For such situations, you can either let Google serve public service ads (which don’t bring you any money, even if people click on them), or instruct Google to serve ads from another URL (which I’ll explain later how to define), or to simply fill the space with a solid color.
If you changed your mind and you want changes, you can go Back to the previous screen. If you are happy with your selections, click Continue, and you’ll be taken to the channels selection screen.

AdSense Ad Channels: What They Are And Why Do We Need Them

Let’s say you have a blog about cats.

You have one article about cat food, one about cat litter and one about common cat diseases. People will read your articles, and some of them will click on ads.

How will know which page of your website brings you the most money in? Maybe on the cat diseases page you get ads for some pet drugs, which pay very well, while on the cat litter page you get only very cheap ads. Supposing that you have two ad units on every page, how will you know which one brings you the most of the income? If you play with the ads’ colors, how will you know which combination gave the best earnings?

You cannot control directly which ads are displayed, but you can track every ad unit, so you’ll be able to fine tune, or even to remove the bad performing units. For this purpose, Google allows you to select up to 5 custom channels for every ad unit, plus one URL channel. This means that you will be able to label, for example, your sidebar unit with one channel called “sidebar_tower”, one channel called “default_palette”, plus you will define a channel for the URL where your ad unit is displayed. If you display this unit on all three pages in our example, by defining one URL channel for each page, you’ll know exactly which one was your best performer. Although you can run your AdSense ads without this, optimizing your ads with channels is a must, if you want to avoid leaving money on the table.

Our next post in this series will be an AdSense ads placement case study, in order for you to see how channels are reported and how tracking can help you maximize your earnings.

I’ve just pointed a few steps for you. In case you need further instructions, Google has a very detailed explanatory guide on how to create a standard ad unit. Follow the steps and you’ll get your code.

It will look like this:

After you copy it like I showed you in the picture, you are ready to insert it on your blog. Use a plugin, or insert it manually, and if you don’t succeed, just leave a comment here, and I’ll guide you step by step.

Other articles in How To Start Making Money With Adsense series:

More articles will be added, and links to these articles will become active as we advance with our AdSense Guide For Beginners series.

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AdSense Smart Pricing: What It Is And How To Overcome It

AdSense Guide: How To Play With Ad Colors

AdSense Channels Tracking And Reporting: Case Study

How To Start Making Money With Adsense - A Basic Guide For Beginners

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