Google AdSense is one of the most popular pay per click advertising program for website publishers. Every program has its own pros and cons and the same is applicable for Google AdSense also. Even though it is one of the reliable PPC program, followings are the AdSense drawbacks from publisher’s perspective.
6 AdSense Drawbacks All Publishers Should Know
- Limited language support
- Duration of site age
- No traffic from social and traffic exchanges
- Postal account verification
- Life time ban for mistakes
- No possibility to change payee name and country
- AdSense ads will impact page speed
- Privacy factor and tracking
1. AdSense Language Support
Most people not aware that applying for AdSense needs many requirements. One such requirement is the primary language of your site. AdSense only supports the languages as shown in the below picture. If your site does not have a primary language as listed here then AdSense is not for you.
| Arabic | Bengali | Bulgarian | Catalan | Chinese (simplified) | Chinese (traditional) |
| Croatian | Czech | Danish | Dutch | English | Estonian |
| Filipino | Finnish | French | German | Greek | Gujarati |
| Hebrew | Hindi | Hungarian | Indonesian | Italian | Japanese |
| Kannada | Korean | Latvian | Lithuanian | Malay | Malayalam |
| Marathi | Norwegian | Polish | Portuguese | Punjabi | Romanian |
| Russian | Serbian | Slovak | Slovenian | Spanish (European) | Spanish (Latin American) |
| Swedish | Tamil | Telugu | Thai | Turkish | Ukrainian |
| Urdu | Vietnamese |
* Only Ad serving is supported in this language, AdSense product support and help center are not available in this language.
2. Site Age
As everyone knows Google has a list of AdSense policies for the publishers to follow. Besides there is a length of site ownership criteria for getting AdSense approval for certain countries.
Publishers from certain locations like India and China should own their site for a minimum period of 6 months before applying for AdSense. Google says this step is taken to guarantee the quality of advertising network and protect the interests of advertisers and existing publishers.
Hence it is worth to wait for 6 months and then apply for AdSense in order to avoid rejection. You can learn here more about all the eligibilities required for applying AdSense account.
3. Prohibited from using Social Sites and Free Traffic Exchanges
Google does not like the publishers to get traffic to their sites from social sites like Facebook. And using free traffic exchange programs is strictly not allowed. If you prefer high social traffic then AdSense is not an option for you or at least you should not display your AdSense ads on the landing pages from social networks.
As social media became unavoidable traffic sources nowadays, Google allows social traffic. But the revenue generated from social and other invalid traffic will be adjusted at the end of the months from your earnings. So remember, Google can roll back your hard earned money on the name invalid activities without even mentioning the exact reason to you.
4. Account Verification and Payments
For most of the countries still Google follows traditional post card verification to confirm your physical address. You need to enter the pin number received from Google in order to get payment when your account reaches the threshold amount for payment. This is a big problem for the publishers those do not have a permanent address or frequently traveling to other countries.
So if you live in another country as an expat then you may not be able to apply for AdSense account due to the postal address verification process.
5. Life Time Ban
You will be banned for life time if Google detects any invalid clicks generated from your publisher id. There are lot of possibilities that someone clicks on your ads frequently or a bot generates ad impression without your knowledge. But Google will ban your AdSense account for life time without the possibility of appealing.
This is a biggest AdSense drawbacks put you in nightmare especially if you completely rely on AdSense earnings for your life. Once banned, it will also become difficult for you to get other advertisers for your site.
6. Change of Country
Your country can’t be changed once your application is approved by Google. If you are not located at one place with stable address then there is no way you can receive your payment in different country than the one you mentioned in your AdSense account.
Google allows to change the payee name if your account is eligible for electronic wire transfer from Google. In this way you can receive the payment in any alternate payee account, but it should be still from the same country.
7. AdSense Ads Drag Page Speed and Impact SEO
The different dimension of AdSense drawbacks is the impact on the page loading speed with AdSense ads. Google uses asynchronous JavaScript to load AdSense ads from the server. This will help to load the advertisements without blocking the content. But this will not help much in achieving higher page speed. There will be dozens of other issues affecting your page speed drastically. Especially, advertisers may still have HTTP sites while yours will be HTTPS. This will cause content mixing and the ads will not load at all.
Also all the images served from Google’s server can’t be cached which will create browser caching issues. If you want a site with lightning speed then say big no to AdSense. You can learn more on how AdSense impacts page speed in our separate article.
8. Privacy Factor
You should always remember Google is a commercial company with the objective of increasing their revenue at first place. So they will track all browsing history of the users in order to serve interest based advertising. Google will track every webpage with AdSense ad code on it to server appropriate ads. This may impact user experience as some people may not like tracking of their browsing activities. They also use the popular Chrome browser and Analytics cookie to track the user activities.
If you want to check the tracking, just open “bluehost.com” website on your browser window. Now open any website that shows AdSense ads. You will see the ads are from “bluehost” or related to web hosting services. As a user, you will clearly find out that someone tracks their activity without their permission. So if you feel this is intruding someone’s privacy then most of the Google products, including AdSense, are not suitable for you.
Final Words
Earning decent money from AdSense after approval needs few years of investment. This will be a hectic time you should be focusing on building content and driving traffic. Believe us, you can invest that time on affiliate marketing or selling digital goods and services or other alternatives. This may take the same amount of time you need to invest for AdSense and probably you may earn huge compared to AdSense earnings. Most importantly, you don’t need to worry about page speed and privacy factors.
So, before you invest long time with the hope of earning from AdSense, we strongly recommend you to think over all the above mentioned AdSense drawbacks are fine for you. Otherwise you will regret your decision after spending huge effort.
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