Hi, I am Praneeth.
In this blog, you will learn the, 10 Advantages and disadvantages of Google Adsense and I will answer whether you should use AdSense in 2020 or not.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
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Advantages and disadvantages of Google Adsense.
Here is a quick overview of the advantages.
| S/no. | Advantages. | Disadvantages. |
| 1 | Largest ad network. | Rules are extremely strict. |
| 2 | Easy to set up. | Irrelevant ads & increase load time. |
| 3 | You don’t need traffic for approval. | Less earnings. |
| 4 | It is famous for its high CPC terms. | 100 dollar limit. |
| 5 | With one account you can manage multiple sites | Payment hassles |
Let’s learn each reason in detail.
Advantages of Google Adsense.
Here is a quick overview of the advantages of Google AdSense.
- It is the largest ad network.
- It is easy to set up you don’t need much technical knowledge.
- you don’t need any traffic to get approved.
- It is famous for High CPC terms.
- With one account you can manage multiple sites.
Let’s learn them step by step in detail.
It is the largest ad network.
Google Adsense is by far the largest ad network.
Google, Facebook all these companies are huge advertisement companies.
They earn billions of dollars by showing ads of advertisers to their customers.
On Google AdSense, there are over 2 million advertisers, and over a billion customers present.
It is a no brainer to know that Adsense is the largest Ad network on the planet.
It is easy to setup.
The largest ad network is very easy to setup.
You first need to have content that’s obvious and after following the policies of AdSense.
You should signup in google Adsense and paste the HTML code from Adsense in your website theme and let the AdSense team do the job of reviewing your website.
After a couple of weeks, you will get a notice of whether your website is approved or not in your Gmail account.
With that, if your website is approved by AdSense, you can either auto-insert ads which is a default feature of Adsense of inserting ads on your website depending on the most engagement on your website sections or you can manually insert ads to wherever you want to place.
There are many plugins like ad inserter that can come in handy for you if you don’t want to get into coding and HTML work.
Overall, it is very easy to set up the AdSense account and get started with AdSense ads on your website.
You don’t need any traffic for approval.
This feature makes Adsense different than most other ad networks.
You simply don’t need any traffic to your website for approval.
This doesn’t mean after getting approval you will have money rolling into your bank account.
No.
You need a lot and I mean a lot of traffic to make a decent amount of earnings in Adsense and most of the traffic must be organic straight from Google.
But overall you just don’t need any traffic in order to get approved for AdSense on your website.
You will learn the rules and policies of AdSense later in this blog so keep reading.
It is famous for its high CPC terms.
Google Adsense pays its publishers who are bloggers, app owners, or website owners basically through 2 metrics.
- CPC.
- CPM.
CPC is the cost per click which is how much an advertiser is willing to spend if a user has clicked on the advertisement.
CPM is how much an advertiser is willing to spend for every 1000 impressions/views of the ad to the users on the website.
This is the basic way most advertising companies pay their users.
But on Adsense, CPC value can go extreme.
Adsense is basically owned by google and google is the largest search engine on the planet.
So advertisers definitely want and are bidding on google to get more people to visit to their website or product.
There are search terms like
If you were to rank on google for these search terms and your ads on these keywords get clicked by users genuinely, you will earn money.
The reason for these high CPC values is,
The main reason being is the customer value is high.
It is simple math.
If advertisers would earn a thousand dollars from a customer by acquiring him then why would advertisers not spend a few hundred dollars on advertising?
Simple and easy isn’t it.
CPC value varies by different factors like,
- Niche.
- Customer value/Quality traffic.
- Competition and country location.
Whereas the average CPM value of AdSense is 2 dollars which is pretty low, even the CPM value depends on a few factors similar to CPC like,
- Kind of website you own.
- Content quality.
- Traffic and location.
If you own a blog and have high research articles and readers are engaging more with the content and obviously viewing ads, CPM can be up to 10 USD.
Click here to learn more about these CPC terms.
With one account you can manage multiple websites.
Instead of logging into different AdSense accounts, you have only a single account and you can manage unlimited websites in that account for Adsense.
Even AdSense allows only 1 account for its publishers, you cannot have 2 AdSense accounts.
You can manage multiple websites you own and get approval for multiple websites you own with a single AdSense account without much hurdles.
You don’t need to login to different accounts to check the earnings and ads and customize the ads here and there on the website.
All those works and hassles are gone.
Now that you know what are the advantages of Google Adsense, let’s find out what are the disadvantages of Google Adsense.
Disadvantages of Google Adsense.
Here is a quick overview of the disadvantages of the Google AdSense ad network.
- Rules are extremely strict.
- Irrelevant ads & increase load time badly.
- Less earning.
- 100 dollars limit.
- Payment hassles.
Let’s learn each reason in detail.
Rules are extremely strict.
You know,
Google is very popular for CPC.
Looking at this,
Many publishers who have AdSense accounts misused the CPC feature and started clicking on their own ads on their friend’s phones or on some other devices.
This obviously leads to huge losses for advertisers and increased the advertiser’s budget and they stopped advertising on Google in the past.
Google and other major social media networks earn through advertisement, it is their only source of income.
Looking at this, Google became very serious about its Adsense rules and policies, and Google today is extremely clever and they will find fishy things on your website very fast
If you are unaware of the rules, here are a few to keep in mind,
- If you involve in Click fraud which is either intentionally clicking on ads of the website or directing users on the website to click on the ads by requesting users to click or placing ads very near to sections of the website where the chances of getting clicked are high or any practice that appears to be intentional for an ad click can ban you for life from AdSense.
- Even if users who are your enemies or enemies of the google or companies which own the ad are clicking on the ads on your website more and more and lead to click fraud.
These click fraud actions are simply no on Adsense.
If you have a ban from Google AdSense, you will in case of click fraud.
It is quite difficult or impossible to get approved by other premium ad networks like media vine and adthrive because they work together with the google ad network.
Thankfully, there are a few plugins on WordPress to avoid click fraud of your AdSense ads such as,
Other than the rules, in order to get approval from Adsense, you need to match and follow their policies.
Click here to read their AdSense policies in detail.
Irrelevant ads and increase load time badly.
Google AdSense ads are of different types such as,
- Display ads.
- Text or link ads.
- In article ads.
- Video ads.
- Page ads.
Though there are different types and formats of ads, most of the time, they are irrelevant to the content you read on the blog.
Ads look really unprofessional ones.
Look,
Google has a lot of user data in its database.
Google collects this through cookies and users’ searches and locations and different factors.
Ever wondered when you searched something on google and started watching similar ads on your browser and youtube videos.
Google pushes ads that are very optimized for clicks and really annoy users and gives a lack of privacy for users and affect user experience on the website.
For example, you searched for a book on google and you keep on getting ads for that book on websites and youtube, it is going to be really annoying and frustrating for users.
Also, the fact is that Google’s Adsense ads take a lot of time to load.
Irrespective of your host, your internet speed.
Ads just take a lot of time to load definitely more than 3 seconds which is the maximum loading speed for a better user experience.
And obviously, that’s going to affect user interactiveness on the website by,
- Decrease dwell time on the website.
- Increase the bounce rate on the website.
- Hurt your rankings in google overall.
Less earning.
This is the most important part of anyone.
How much you make from Adsense is a very important question.
Without learning anything more,
From all the AdSense income you generate through clicks and impressions, you will only get 68% of the total money transferred to your bank account.
Which means Google is going to have 32% of the money as commission.
Commission seems to be a bit much, huh.
Well, you can’t do anything about it.
Earnings are less because you should not do click fraud and the ctr of clicks of ads should be less than 5% as it appears genuine.
Well, there is no exact ctr value but obviously higher ctr can and will lead to click fraud and eventually ban from google.
The higher the ctr gets, the higher the chances of your AdSense account being banned due to click fraud.
Overall, if you really want to earn a decent amount of money from Adsense, you need to drive a lot of traffic to your website.
Traffic must be organic not from social media like,
- Facebook ads.
- Instagram.
- Pinterest.
Social traffic is not going to create a big impact on AdSense earnings, you need a lot of organic traffic for better earnings in Adsense and that is tough.
Traffic must be, of good quality and good countries like in European countries and America because the people from these countries have more purchasing power and are developed countries which are obviously suited for advertisers.
But, you should not rely on AdSense income or income from ads in general because,
A large portion of people is using ad blockers on their browsers.
- According to Statista, 25 percent of people use Adblockers on the internet.
100 dollar limit.
This one is another big headache for people who use Adsense.
There is a minimum threshold limit of 100 dollars on your AdSense account.
Unless you pass the mark of 100 dollars without doing any click fraud genuinely you cannot withdraw the amount to your bank account.
This is an issue for those. who are very largely dependent on ads for their income.
You cannot guarantee traffic all the time to your website.
If you are in urgency of money or some emergency you still cannot withdraw money due to that threshold limit.
If the threshold limit of 100 dollars does not get completed in 1 month, that money will get transferred to next month and you will and can only withdraw money after you cross the limit.
That’s a really bad one for those who have less traffic or fluctuations in their traffic like a seasonal niche.
Payment hassles.
Well,
Basically what I mean by payment hassles is,
When you reach the verification limit of your earnings which is around 10 dollars.
Google sends you a personal identification number [pin] to your payment address which is your home address where you live.
Google says they send the pin to the address to verify the accuracy of the account information.
It will take up to 2-4 weeks to get your pin mail through the postal card to your address.
There are a few rules here.
- If you don’t enter the pin number in the verification of address within 4 months of the pin generated time, Google will stop showing ads on your pages.
- The pin is 6 digit number different from your publisher id and if you fail to enter the exact pin number within 3 attempts, ads are not going to be shown on the pages.
There are few problems here,
- If you are a publisher who doesn’t have a permanent address like rent house.
- If you are a publisher along with a regular traveler.
- If you are a publisher and stuck in a country which is not your home.
It is pretty bad,
Because, while entering the details of your account initially you enter the country you live in, and even if you apply for the verification pin you will get a post to the address you have given which is there in your account while being approved.
The whole purpose of the PIN and verification process is to know the accuracy of the account information and location address of the publisher.
Learn more about the pin verification process here.
Learn more about the different thresholds of AdSense here.
Should you use Google Adsense?
Well, the answer depends on your interests, your website type, and your intentions.
If your website has,
- Traffic from many countries.
- You can’t monetize your website other than ads.
- Your audience type is not that valuable.
You can use AdSense there is no problem with it,
But,
If you,
- You want higher earnings.
- You want a better loading time of ads.
- You don’t want to lose rankings due to ads.
- You have traffic from better locations like Europe and America.
- Your niche users are more valuable and are better for advertisers.
You should consider premium ad networks like Adthrive and mediavine, they earn you better I would say 5x to what you would earn through Adsense.
Of course, they won’t pay you through CPC but they pay you through CPM.
But in order to get through the ad networks, you need to match with their requirements.
What are the alternatives to Google AdSense?
Well, there are many alternatives to Google Adsense like in terms of ad networks,
- Media.net.
- Adsterra.
- Propeller Ads.
- Ezoic.
- Adbuff.
Click here to learn more about the alternatives to AdSense.
If you want to have a different source of income,
- You can sell an ebook.
- You can start affiliate marketing.
- You can start an online course.
- You can start the consultation business.
- You can get hired as a freelancer.
- You can sell membership sites.
- You can sell your own merchandise.
There are so many ways you can earn money other than AdSense and ads in general if you have a blog.
If you have a static website or a forum or an app or any online tool,
You can only monetize it with ads.
Ending remarks.
There you go, I have answered everything about the advantages and disadvantages of google Adsense.
Do consider sharing the blog with your family and friends, you know sharing is caring.
Comment down whether you are going to start Adsense ads on your blog/website or not.
Read my other blogs,
I will catch you next time, till then,
Keep learning and keep growing.