Have you been banned from Google Adsense for a mysterious reason?
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Getting banned from Google Adsense is pretty common. Why you are banned is usually a mystery, and thousands of people are frustrated with Google’s lack of customer support or even a proper appeals process.
Adsense is not a company you want to mess with. If you’re a newbie, I recommend NOT singing up until you’re clear about the rules of how to legitimately use their ads. Simple stuff like clicking your own ads to “test” them is a typical mistake newbies make, and very clearly against the rules.
If you were banned from Adsense, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll talk more in-depth below, but you have options. For example, try Media.Net. Depending on your niche and traffic source, earnings can be comparable to Adsense or even better (thought Media.net usually underperforms).
If you are scared of being banned from Adsense because of draconian rules, I like Ezoic. This service has lower traffic requirements than other ad networks I’ll talk about below, and they actually have a real person you can talk about potential Adsense violations and how to clear them up. Specifically, they allow you to test Google ad positions and sizes to optimize your earnings. Plus, you’ll even get plugged into multiple ad networks so companies can compete for space on your website! [Important! Ezoic does not accept websites or Adsense accounts that have been banned by Google Advertising]
That face you make when Google sends you a ‘friendly’ email about getting the boot
- How My Friend Got Banned From Adsense
- Why Adsense Is Terrible For Earnings
- What if You Aren’t An Affiliate Marketer?
- Alternatives To Adsense
- About BuySellAds
- The Best Way To Monetize Your Website (For New Webmasters)
How My Friend Got Banned From Adsense
My friend, who’s an online marketer, was banned from Adsense back in 2011. When it happened, he was completely insulted, distraught, and confused as to how he got banned from Google’s Adsense program. He was just getting his feet under himself in the affiliate marketing world. He had a couple websites up, and had his first two regular payouts with Adsense, totaling to something around $100. Display ads weren’t making much compared to his affiliate marketing efforts, but it was enough for him to finally equate more traffic with more ad revenue.
Then he got the email.
After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your Adsense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your Adsense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers….
He sent a letter of appeal as they suggested. Within a few days they sent this to him: (I’ll include the whole message, just because he was even more shocked to see how straightforward they were in telling him that he had no chance of ever getting back into the program, and he should stop asking.
Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve provided, as well as your continued interest in the Adsense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re unable to reinstate your Adsense account.
Please know that, once we’ve reached a decision on your appeal, further appeals may not be considered, and you might not receive any further communication from us. Note that Adsense publishers whose accounts are disabled for violations of our Terms and Conditions are not eligible for further participation in Adsense. For this reason, you may not open new accounts.
Also, accounts disabled for invalid click activity will receive no further payment nor any reissue of previous payment. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
We understand that you may want more information about your account activity. However, because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection systems, we’re unable to provide our publishers with any details about their account activity.
Again; Irate, bewildered, and unsure of how he would get his account, he consulted with his buddies in the online marketing world. The general consensus was that it wasn’t a big deal, and that he would probably be better off without Adsense ads anyway.
Looking back, I think I know why he was banned from Adsense. At first, I thought it was because he had a Chinese IP and sometimes used a VPN to get an American IP to do his online work. Later, I realized that he was running too many websites with low quality content in similar niches. It was original content that he wrote, but it was spun a lot of the time, so violated their content policies.
He probably also had ad placement violations, which includes placing ads under dropdown menus or close to links which may cause unintentional clicks. I guess a lot of his traffic was coming from China too, so it was sending poor quality traffic to advertisers.
These are all just guesses of course.
Why Adsense Is Terrible For Earnings
It took a couple months of being annoyed, but he finally arrived at the conclusion that getting banned from Adsense was as a blessing in disguise. Here are some things we realized.
- We rarely click on Adsense ads
- We hate ads, especially ones that distract us when viewing a website
- We weren’t making much money anyway
- We can make more with less traffic using affiliate marketing
- If we desperately want ads on our site there are alternatives
One thing to consider is that when placing Adsense on your website, it’s very likely linking to your competitors website. If you get good ranking in Google and a visitor comes to your site, then clicks an ad, you receive a few pennies to send them away to another website. They are leaving your website to go buy something on someone else’s website! Considering display ads are often relevant to recent searches, your competitors could be leveraging your top rankings to drive traffic to their own websites via PPC.
Why would I create a website to send traffic to my competitors sites? Why not rank my own pages do my own promotions, and make $1 per visitor instead of $0.01 per visitor? This is totally possible. I personally created one website (now sold) which made $2,000 per month from 50-100 visitors per day. Using those same metrics, I’d only make about $0.11 per day from display ads. From that point I swore I would “never” put any ads on my site that I wasn’t going to directly benefit from.
Never say never! If you browse away from this page, you’ll notice that years later, I finally put some display ads on this website. I have since changed my mind on this “never use Adsense” policy. I do use display ads on a large portion of my pages for the time being. I’m earning an extra $3,500/mo from the traffic now. I can’t scoff at $40k per year in ad revenue!
However, I still keep ads off my affiliate pages, because I still make far more from those pages by using affiliate links. One page can make me $2,000 or more per month with the right keyword, or $10,000 per month using the right funnel strategy. Why would I risk those conversions with random ads?
What if You Aren’t An Affiliate Marketer?
Later on down the road, I realized that a lot of people use the Adsense strategy to monetize their blogs because they get lots of traffic and activity, but are not actively promoting anything. For example an article about the “top 10 haircuts for men in 2016” is kind of hard to promote affiliate products.
It’s very possible to still make good money with display ads, even if you are banned from Adsense. Many new options have opened up in recent years. If you are just not into the affiliate marketing thing, you can still make money with display ads.
Alternatives To Adsense
- Amazon CPM: This is my favorite. I get better results with Amazon than I ever have with Adsense. Maybe it’s just my niche.
- Media.net: Pays surprisingly well, and has much more relaxed policies than Google
- Content.ad: These are very annoying ads, but they do pay. That’s why so many people have them on their website
- Chitika: Gets a lot of mentions as an Adsense alternative, but I haven’t worked with them.
- Spoutable: Kind of annoying exit popup style ads, but can be effective
- GumGum: In image ads. Useful for image heavy websites like cooking or travel sites
- Criteo: Haven’t used this one yet
- AdThrive: Haven’t used this one yet
- Monumetric: Haven’t used this one yet
If you have been banned by Adsense, you will almost always be prevented from using Google Certified Publisher Networks. Those are the companies I mentioned in this article like MediaVine and Ezoic. Although they are not Google companies they basically work with Google to serve up ads.
In other words, MediaVine and Ezoic don’t accept websites that have been banned by Adsense.
You can still use Chitika, Media.net, and others, that only serve up non-Google ads. You should still consider the type of content you’re creating and how you’re sending traffic to your website. What you did to piss off Google may also cause issues with these companies.
That being said, some services, like Spoutable and Content.ad serve pretty low-quality ads and probably don’t care.
About BuySellAds
I haven’t sold ads using BuySellAds, but I have bought some, and it was pretty awesome. I think you’ll have to get some pretty good traffic to attract advertisers, but this could potentially bring you some big chunks of profit. I was paying $50 per month for 1 sidebar ad on a website. I’m sure there’s a range of prices and ad sizes to consider, but the fact is that it was a flat fee, regardless of traffic and clicks. The downside is that they can pull the ads at any time.
The Best Way To Monetize Your Website (For New Webmasters)
Honestly, if you’re just starting out, putting display ads on your site is going to look terrible and not make money. As a newbie, you going to want to overdo it and place as many ads as possible (trust me, I did this), and it’s going to ruin the user experience of your website.
It’s generally tolerated and accepted, but let’s be honest — nobody likes ads. Even I don’t like ads, and I need them to for a monthly paycheck!
Since you won’t be making much money from display ads with low traffic, here are my suggestions:
1) Start out with no ads. Build a site based on content. Once you started getting a few hundred visitors per day, then THINK about adding one single ad, in an out of the way place.
2) Join an affiliate program. Most of them are free to join, and you can tailor ads on your site based on your own preferences, not some autobot cookie monster. If you are interested in making money with display ads, then you probably already have a blog and write for it. There’s not much else to do on top of that to make money with affiliate marketing.
The rest is just about learning a bit about SEO (not as hard as it sounds), and maybe learn something about online marketing to optimize your profits and develop a business strategy.
3) Create your own banner ads. When I started out, I was obsessed with getting ads in the sidebar because that’s what I typically saw online. I thought those were the money-makers! (I found out later that sidebar ads don’t really convert well since they are too general). What I do is create my own graphic and use affiliate links. At least then, when I get clicks and sales, it’s a $20 commission instead of a $0.20 click.
When traffic starts to increase, you can start using display ads. I used to be really against these types of ads, but considering that some folks are making $40,000 per month in advertising revenue, and I, myself, am earning over $40k per year in ad revenue alone, I can’t knock it any more.
Ads are ugly, so I’m not happy about it. But it’s a great fallback plan for content that doesn’t convert well, and perfect for folks that just don’t understand (or want to learn) about building a funnel, a list, or even doing product reviews. If you really do want to monetize your My Little Pony Fan Fiction website, this is a great way to do it.
Here’s the full list of Adsense alternatives.
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!