This page provides some best practices to help you integrate with the AdSense Host API successfully. These are divided into the following sections:
- Business Model
- Ad Placement
- Content Guidelines
- Traffic Monitoring
- Identifying Suspicious User Activity
Business Model
To encourage a strong user base that creates good content for your site, users should not be driven to your site for the sole purpose of creating content to make money.
To further encourage a strong user base, we advise you to consider limiting AdSense sign ups to only the top contributors on your site.
We strongly advise that you set a minimum number of posts before your users are eligible for monetization and applying for AdSense.
Ad Placement
To prevent invalid clicks on your site and to keep your account in good standing, please ensure the ad implementation on your site strictly follows the AdSense program policies. Note that it is against the AdSense terms and conditions to modify AdSense code.
Any ad implementation that may cause users to accidentally click on the ads must be avoided. Ads should be kept away from any part of the page where there are interactive controls present, such as play buttons for games and videos.
You can help prevent incorrect ad implementation by outlining specific sections of your pages that are for ad placement (such as a single banner ad at the top of the page, or on the side of the page that does not scroll with a user's movement).
Content Guidelines
AdSense code should not be placed on any pages with content that violates any of our content guidelines.
Targeting on pages should not be manipulated to confuse users or show ads that are not related to the page's content.
The site should not contain any content that tells users to click on the ads. This includes encouraging users to click on ads with phrases like "support us", "click the ads", or other similar language.
Users should not be compensated for viewing or clicking on ads, and performing searches. This includes games or point systems that would incentivize a user to click on the ads.
The content on the site should be original and not copied from other sources.
Traffic Monitoring
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To ensure that the ads on your site receive clean, healthy traffic, we recommend you regularly monitor the traffic to your site. Use existing tools like AdSense channels or Google Analytics to help you see where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, and what they generally do once they are on your site.
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It's important to know the quality of the traffic you are receiving from third parties. We understand the need to have ad campaigns to promote your website, but it's equally important to monitor what kind of traffic these promotions generate.
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You must also be aware of the traffic that your users are generating when they have signed up to monetize their pages and content through your partnership with us. The traffic they are driving may be invalid to help drive up their earnings on your pages.
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Develop a system to segment your users into groups to help you monitor their content as well as the performance on their pages. This will help you remove content and users that are violating AdSense guidelines.
Identifying Suspicious User Activity
Monitor for repeat applications from a single IP.
Look for applications with same or similar names, mailing addresses, or email addresses.
Create tracking mechanisms that allow you to group together a single user's content pages and see traffic going to it. For example, large spikes in traffic to certain pages could indicate invalid traffic. Also, looking for things like unexpected fluctuations in click through rates or unusual spikes in traffic from unexpected countries will be helpful.
Look for scraped/copied content.