How long before putting Adsense on a new site?

[brokenbricks]

I'm working on a few new sites that are close to launch, but I'm contemplating whether or not it's smart to have Ad Sense on them right away.

I designed the sites with them so I could set up my page and ad placement, but am wondering whether I should try to build up some traffic and a bit of a following before I include the ads...

Any experience?

The ads are very minimal and are blended in with the content...I can't see them offending anyone...I'm probably more concerned about getting linked to..

Is it not smart to have ads right from the start?

[lammert]

If your first visitors are friends and relatives who want to see your new creation, it is probably not smart to put ads on it right away. If the accidentaly click a few times on your ads, the Google algo might flag them as invalid clicks.

However, if you expect that your visitors will come from random places on earth via search engines or other sources, there is no need to wait with placing the ads. Money is money and those first bucks can motivate you to add more content to the site.

If people won't link to you because of ads, they probably won't link to you anyway because of the PR0 of your new sites.

[Critters]

I would leave it a week, let G crawl the site, then you will get targeted ads from the off.. While you wait:

Check it is in Google AdSense Programme Policies:
[google.com...]

Check your site is GoogleBot friendly:
[google.com...]

And submit it to Google at:
[google.com...]

[lammert]

let G crawl the site, then you will get targeted ads from the off..

The Googlebot crawler does not index pages for AdSense. Only after you put AdSense code on a page the Mediabot crawler will come by and scan the page for the ads. And even then it often takes a second crawl after a few weeks before all ad blocks are filled with targetted ads.

I know sites which are not in the SERPs but have targetted ads, but I also know sites that rank good in the SERPs but only show off-topic ads even after several crawls by the Mediabot, so Googlebot and Mediabot are not related.

[Critters]

my bad :( my other points stand tho :)

[ronburk]

One big plus I found to starting AdSense early is getting that feedback about what topics bring in the money. Although there are lots of research tools to figure out who's paying for what, I find the only way to really know is to stick the AdSense and see what the payback is. I would not invest a lot of time in content before starting to get that AdSense feedback on what content advertisers actually value.

[7_Driver]

On a site we launched last year, I left it about four months before putting adsense on it.

Planning to launch another site soon - and will leave it AT LEAST 6 months.

Reasoning:

Google ads in prominant (see heatmap) positions work best - but aren't ideal for promoting a site in its infancy.

(My) new sites have very little traffic during the first few months (compared to my existing ones), so the income lost by leaving off the Google ads during this period is negligable.

[Prolific]

I agree with ronburk, get your adsense on there sooner than later. Another benefit that ronburk didn't mention is that you can tweak your placement/colors and see what works best early on, this will increase your earnings faster when the traffic starts to flow.

Another good approach is to start an adwords account and start buying some $0.05 traffic just to get things moving. I recently launched a site using this technique and it brings in 7x what I spend on adwords.

[YesMom]

Another good approach is to start an adwords account and start buying some $0.05 traffic just to get things moving. I recently launched a site using this technique and it brings in 7x what I spend on adwords.

Can't agree more!

This strategy works great for me, especially to jumpstart new sites. I just make sure I'm at least breaking even. But I often see results in the 4 - 5x range.

[wyweb]

Is it not smart to have ads right from the start?

why not? I mean you've obviously already left blocks of space open for the ads so why not fill them up?

All of this hinges on how you plan to get traffic to this site. If you're doing heavy advertising then by all means launch the ads. If it's just going to trickle in then it's not going to be that big of a deal... so why not show the ads anyway.

You want your websites to make you money, right?