Before getting into the list, a warning that almost no one puts up front: AdSense is not passive income. It is an advertising system that pays for impressions and clicks, and in practice it requires reviewing metrics every week. If you are looking for a formula to monetize traffic without touching anything, this checklist won’t help you. If you accept that you have to measure, correct, and sometimes disable blocks that perform poorly, keep reading.
Preliminary checklist: requirements that Google actually checks
According to AdSense’s official documentation, approval depends on original content, clear navigation, and compliance with policies. In practice, what generates the most rejections is not the design, but pages with little value: empty legal notices, categories without articles, content duplicated from other sites.
- Original and substantial content on the main pages, not just on the blog. The “About” and “Contact” pages are also reviewed.
- Functional navigation: menus that lead to real content, with no broken links or chain redirects.
- Policies complied with: no adult content, weapons, drugs, or material that infringes copyright.
- Language correctly declared on the site; a poorly tagged bilingual website confuses the review.
- No purchased traffic or artificial visit sources: it is grounds for rejection and, later, for suspension.
A detail that you only discover through practice: if you submit the application with the site under construction or with few published posts, the rejection comes quickly and you have to wait to try again. It is advisable to have the site mature before the first submission.
Technical configuration checklist after approval
Once the program is approved, the real work begins. These points directly affect how much you earn:
- Verify site ownership in the AdSense panel and place the script in the <head> or through the CMS plugin.
- Enable ads.txt: if it is missing or incorrect, some advertisers stop bidding and the CPM drops. Check it in the panel; the file must be at the domain root and accessible without redirects.
- Review cookie consent. In the European Union, without a valid CMP you cannot show personalized ads and revenue suffers. AdSense offers its own consent tool, but it is advisable to check that it fires before the advertising tags.
- Check crawling: make sure the script is not blocked by robots.txt or by an overly strict content security policy.
- Error and 404 pages: if they accumulate impressions without useful content, they generate low-value impressions that muddy the metrics.
Ad placement checklist: what to test and what to avoid
Placement influences more than traffic volume in many projects. Test these placements and compare the RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) between variants:
- First block after the first paragraph of the article, without pushing the text off the screen on mobile.
- Mid-content block after an H2 subheading, when the reader is already engaged.
- Block at the end of the content, before the comments or related content.
- Sidebar only on desktop; on mobile it usually hurts the experience and isn’t worth it.
Avoid: ads that overlap with navigation buttons, blocks that cause layout shifts (high CLS), and excessive density on pages with little text. A common mistake is filling a 400-word article with blocks: CTR goes up, but RPM goes down because the clicks are low-value and the experience gets worse.
Measurement checklist: what to look at and how often
- RPM by page template, not just the site total. A healthy average RPM can hide a category that is losing money.
- CTR by placement, comparing blocks and not individual pages.
- Countries report: traffic from markets with lower purchasing power pays less per click; if your audience is widely spread out, adjust to reality.
- Platforms report: mobile and desktop perform differently; a placement that works on desktop can be a drag on mobile.
- Weekly policy review: a rule change can leave blocks not serving without you finding out until revenue drops.
The recommended frequency is weekly for placements and monthly for category review. Changing blocks every day prevents you from drawing conclusions: the data needs at least a week to stabilize.
Risk checklist: what can bring down your account
- Invalid clicks: never ask for clicks or place ads next to download or navigation buttons. It is the most common cause of suspension.
- Content that violates policies: a single problematic page can affect the entire domain.
- Traffic from dubious sources: visit networks, bots, or third-party pop-ups that redirect to your site.
- Tax and payment details not updated: revenue is withheld and not paid out.
- Dependence on a single source: AdSense can represent 100% of your advertising revenue; a policy change or a CPM drop leaves you without a safety net.
Here it is worth being transparent: no checklist guarantees revenue. There are niches with structurally low CPMs (general entertainment content, for example) where AdSense rarely compensates the effort compared with other monetization routes, such as affiliate marketing or direct sale of ad space. Recognizing this in time avoids months of misdirected work.
Scaling and diversification checklist
- Test formats (display, in-article, anchor) in isolation to attribute results.
- Compare with alternative networks once traffic exceeds a certain volume; many ad networks require minimum visit thresholds that AdSense does not.
- Document every change with the date and benchmark metric; without a record, it is impossible to know what worked.
- Review the balance between experience and monetization: if bounce rate rises and time on page falls, revenue per session usually drops even if CTR goes up.
A specific case that repeats itself: a site gets approved for AdSense, places four blocks per article, and sees CTR rise for two weeks. A month later, RPM drops because load speed got worse and Google reduces the auction on slow pages. The fix is to remove blocks, not add more. That kind of adjustment doesn’t appear in generic guides and can only be detected by comparing performance metrics with revenue metrics.
If there is anything on this list you cannot verify, don’t take it for granted. AdSense’s official documentation and the reports in the panel itself are the reference; any promise of guaranteed revenue should be treated with skepticism.