How many Adsense ads can be used per page?

Adsense is the best advertising placement service ever made. Haters will argue, of course, because Google has always been hard on “cheaters,” and imposes extremely strict rules in their terms of use policies. Failing to comply can result in severe consequences and ultimately a permanent ban from Adsense. Again for haters, when something good bans you, it will systematically become a bad thing. Lucky us! Less for you, more for us good guys. One of those violations is related to how many Adsense ad banners you can safely use. This magic number was up to 3 for regular accounts and up to 6 for premium partners. But this particular limit was reviewed by Google.

What is the new limit for Adsense ads per page?

As from August 2016, Google has totally lifted the ads per page limit as follow:

Old (now obsolete) policy

Currently, on each page AdSense publishers may place:

• Up to three AdSense for content units
• Up to three link units
• Up to two search boxes

Publishers may not place more than one “large” ad unit per page. We define a “large” ad unit as any unit similar in size to our 300×600 format.

A new policy, with the 3 ads-limit lifted

Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content. Furthermore, the content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page. For this reason, we may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made. Examples of unacceptable pages include but are not limited to:

• Mirroring, framing, scraping or rewriting of content from other sources without adding value;
• Pages with more advertising than publisher-provided content;
• Automatically generated content without manual review or curation;
• Hosted ad pages or pages without content;
• Pages that don’t follow our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Source: Google Adsense support portal.

Can we now use an unlimited number of ads per page?

Yes and no. The limit is lifted, which is a good thing. But you still need to comply with Google’s content balance policy that some of us might misunderstand. The following is an explanation of the main guidelines: Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content. This part is critical because it does include additional promotional materials other than Google Adsense ads. The total promotional materials can’t exceed your page’s content. You can’t, for example, put a small paragraph and surround it with Adsense ads, Amazon affiliate links, and other sales, ads banners. Or write an advertorial, which is focused on promoting a specific product, and use Google Ads with it. The content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page. Quality content is a prominent ranking factor for Google. It does make sense if they used it as a metric for their ads program, right? In my opinion, the main reason why Google lifted the limit for is to reward quality content. Quality content, as you might have noticed, seems to be lengthier than before. You can quickly reach the cap of 1000 words for regular articles and probably double or triple for more in-depth and engaging releases. The issue here is that the likely lengthy quality content doesn’t have enough ads to monetize it. Three ads unit for 500 words will have great coverage. What about double, triple or quadruple that amount? You worked hard to produce quality content, and you should have more flexibility to monetize it. We may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made. Like anything in life, cheaters will attempt to try and hack it. And quality content is no different. And this covers the second set of rules imposed by Google on that matter regarding the content. Google gives itself the right to disable ads for low-quality content pages and/or excessively using ads. What rings Google’s bells is the following:

• Copying content.
• All blackhat techniques such as automatically generated and scraped content, cloaking, irrelevant keywords.
• Abusive affiliate links without adding sufficient value.
• And all other Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Google is now well equipped to spot any violation regarding the pages purpose and the content’s quality. As a hint:

• Bounce rate.
• Time spent on the website.
• Traffic sources.

Google can now safely delegate the limit management to the publisher’s discretion. As long as they follow the rules, nothing bad shall happen to them.

Is there a sweet spot for the balance?

Nope. It will depend on the content volume and the website’s structure. Generally speaking, it’s not the number of ads that do the trick. Instead of looking for an optimal ads number, make sure to:

• Test different ad placements and try to cover all the reading areas for your website’s page structure.
• Try different ad types and ad sizes.
• Try different ad number.

The most important thing here is experimenting until you maximize your revenue using variants of the above.