How To Add Ads to Your Website

There are many reasons for creating a website: raising awareness of a business, selling a product or services, pursuing a passion project, educating others, or earning money, whether to make a living or supplement an existing source of income. 

If one of your website goals is to earn money, hosting ads on your site is a low-investment way to start. Ad hosting typically involves creating dedicated space for ads on your website. When visitors click on those ads, you’ll earn some commission. Read on to consider whether your site could benefit from ad hosting and best practices for getting started.

Note: This content was created in collaboration with Google AdSense.

Why add ads to your website?

While there are many ways to make money from a website, methods like running an online store, affiliate marketing, or offering professional services may not fit everyone’s plans. Ad placements allow you to earn money from your website without having to create a dedicated product or piece of content. 

This is especially useful for content creators who may not want to charge their audience for content. It also allows you to earn a passive income, since you don’t need to actively manage each ad to earn income from it. 

How to host ads on your website

A simple way to start displaying ads on your website is to integrate a tool that can manage and run ads for you. You’ll connect the tool to your site, and it should handle ad setup and selection, then pay out a commission based on its terms.

Google AdSense is among the most well-known ad providers. Google AdSense handles all the ad setup, ensuring ad quality and relevance to your audience. You have control over ad types, placement, and design, so you can make them unobtrusive and enhance your visitors' experience. 

Learn how to use Google AdSense on Squarespace

How much money can you earn from website ads?

Website ads typically pay commission based on ad clicks. Your earnings depend on a few key details:

• Commission rate from your ad platform

• Advertiser bids, i.e., how much brand pay for their ads to display

• Number of clicks on each ad

As your traffic grows, so does your earning potential. Every platform will have its own terms for how it calculates commission and when you’re paid. 

For example, Google AdSense offers monthly payments once you reach a minimum earnings threshold. AdSense users get approximately 68% of the total earnings from their ad units. Your actual earnings per click depend on how much the advertiser bid for their ad to appear in AdSense. 

Here’s the formula Google uses to pay its AdSense users a commission for clicks:
# of ad clicks * bid amount *.68 = Your Commission

So, if you had an ad that received 100 clicks and the advertiser bid $1.00 on it, you’d earn: 100 * 1.00 * .68 = $68

Your website, niche, brand authority, as well as the quantity and quality of your website traffic can all affect your ad earnings. If you’re curious to see your potential earnings, you can use Google AdSense’s calculator. Note that the calculator starts at 50,000 monthly page views, so you may need to increase your traffic to net high profits.

Types of website ads

Before you start setting up your own ad placements, you’ll first need to get acquainted with the various types of online ads available. Choose options that fit most naturally into your website design so that they don’t impact its usability.

• Display ads: These are the typical banner ads with images that you find around the web. You can place them anywhere on your site, as a variety of sizes and shapes are available.

• In-feed ads: For blogs, magazines, directories, product reviews and other list-like content, these ads appear between listings or posts in your feed.

• In-article ads: Similar to in-feed ads, these work well for publishers, reviewers, and listicle sites. The main difference is that the ads appear in the middle of your content.

• Link ads: Visitors will see a list of linked topics. When they click a topic link, they’ll be shown relevant ads—and it’s only when they click an ad that you get paid.

• Search engine ads: You can place a search box on your site that displays ads in the results. You’ll get paid for clicks on those ads.

How to start with Google AdSense

If you have a Squarespace website, Google AdSense is a popular choice to add ads to your website. You’ll need to paste code provided by AdSense into code blocks on your website, a feature that’s only available on certain Squarespace website plans. Here’s how to set up AdSense for your website.

1. Create a Google AdSense account

Go to the Google AdSense site and click Get Started. On the next page, Google will ask you for three things:

1. Your website URL

2. Ihre E-Mail-Adresse

3. Whether or not you want customized help optimizing your ads

In the email address field, enter a Gmail address if you have one. If you don’t, you’ll need to create one.

2. Set up your payment information

Before you can start running ads on your site, make sure Google has all the information it needs to pay you.

Go to the Payments tab on the left side of the page. This will take you to your Payments dashboard. When you start earning ad revenue, you’ll see it here.

For now, you’ll need to:

• Update the How you get paid area with your banking information.

• Fill in your payments profile under Settings so Google can verify your information and tax details.

You may also want to briefly review your Account settings. The information should be up-to-date if you have an existing Google account. If it’s not, make the necessary edits.

3. Connect your website to Google AdSense

Now, it’s time to sync your website with AdSense. To do this, you’ll need to add an activation code to your site. This signals to Google that it can place ads there.

From your Google AdSense dashboard, go to Sites. Then, click Add Site and enter your domain name. In the next screen, you’ll be provided with a custom code along with instructions for embedding it on your website.

Once you’ve pasted the code into your site, go back to the Google AdSense screen. Then, click Get Review. Google will take you back to your dashboard. You may have to wait up to two weeks for Google to verify your website, but you can still get a head start in setting up ads. 

4. Choose your ad placements

At this point, you’ve told Google that you want it to place ads on your site. But how will you decide where to display those ads?

There are two options for determining where the ads will show up: You can either let Google choose for you, or you can select the placements yourself. 

Option 1: Use Google automation

A quick way to create ad placements is by using Google’s automated tool. This can be helpful if:

• You’re brand new to website monetization and need help with it.

• You’re thinking about custom placements, but want to first see what Google considers the optimal positioning of your ads.

• Ads would look fine on any page of your site—especially if you’re a publisher or blogger—so there’s no need to hand-pick your ad units.

To to set up Google automation:

1. Go to the Ads section in your AdSense dashboard.

2. Click the pencil next to your domain name under By site to see a rendering of what auto ads might look like on your website.

3. Switch on Auto ads to move forward with automation.

4. Increase or decrease the number of ads shown under Ad load.

5. Include any pages you don’t want to display ads on under Page exclusions.

In that same panel, you also get to control what types of ads you display:

• In-page ads from Google advertisers

• Matched content from your own site (Note: You have to have a high volume of traffic to be eligible for matched content)

• Vignette ads between page loads

• Wide-screen ads on desktop

Option 2: Create custom ad placements

Alternatively, you may prefer to manually select your ad placements. You might want to choose this over the automated option if:

• You don’t want ads to appear on every page of your site.

• You want control over which parts of the page they appear on, so you can ensure a positive user experience.

• You want to use ads to monetize high-traffic areas of your site that are informational, but not revenue-generating, like blog posts, property listings, and recipe pages.

Best practices when using website ads

While website ads can be a source of passive income, there are some techniques that can help you develop a successful ad strategy. 

1. Publish content regularly

Your ad earnings depend on clicks from your website visitors. You need steady and engaged traffic coming to your website if you want them to take notice of the ads there and click through. 

Creating high-quality content and optimizing it so that the right people find it in search will help you attract visitors. To keep traffic consistent and build a regular following, you’ll need to update regularly or find other ways to bring people to your site, like a newsletter.

2. Prioritize page content over ads

Your website is the home of your brand. What you do should be the highlight of your website, not ads for other companies. Be careful about how many ads you allow on each page and where they’re placed. Too many or overly distracting ads won’t just leave a bad impression on your site visitors, it’ll pull focus from your pages. Ultimately, your content should be getting more attention than the ads themselves.

3. Don’t try to game the system

Google AdSense and other ad platforms have very strict program policies, many of which revolve around deceptive practices that artificially boost your commission. This includes things like clicking on your own links, incentivizing others to click on ads, or using a tool to push high quantities of traffic to an ad-enabled page.

4. Match ads to your audience

Ad platforms like AdSense will pair your ads with the content of your site. For example, a food blogger might automatically get ad placements from cookware brands. However, make a change if it mistakenly displays a competitor’s ad or something that doesn’t align with the values of your brand. Google AdSense has built-in blocking controls to remove any conflicts.

5. Keep an eye on your reports

Decide which performance indicators you want to track—website traffic, ad clicks, and earnings are good places to start. Bounce rates—how often people land on your website and quickly exit—can also be a good gauge of whether your content feels relevant to them.

Check in on these metrics at least once a week to see how your ad units are performing. Google AdSense users can find these in the dedicated Reports area. You can then make informed decisions when it comes to drawing better traffic to your site, optimizing your ad placements, or improving your content or site design.

6. A/B test your ads

Another thing you can do to improve your earning potential is to experiment with different ad units, placements, colors, and sizes. In Google AdSense, you can use the Experiments under Optimization to conduct A/B tests on your ads. Or you can have Google do the assessment and automatically adjust your ad units for you. 

A/B tests allow you to test two ads against each other to see which performs best. This can help you make sure your ads are optimized or if it's worth considering another type of ad.