Google AdSense Units Limit: How Many Ads Should You Put on a Page?

Google recently updated its AdSense policy to remove the 3 ads per page limit for its publishers. Until recently, since most bloggers used AdSense, this was the default limit of the number of ads they could place on their blog. However, after this AdSense policy change, you may be wondering as to what is the optimum number of ad units which should be placed on your blog. Read on find out TechZog’s take on this question.

Keep User Experience Paramount

[ictt-tweet-blockquote]Content is King, User Experience is Queen[/ictt-tweet-blockquote]

Remember, user experience is a big factor in ensuring audience engagement and loyalty, both of which are critical to long-term profitability of your blog. Hence, if users see too many ads on your blog as compared to content, it may be annoying for them. This will result in increased bounce rates and consequently lower search engine rankings for your blog. Google themselves have stated, in their policy that they will simply stop serving to pages which are thin on content. The text under the Valuable inventory heading is reproduced below

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.

This policy change is very smart as it leaves the decision of the optimal number of ads to the publisher. Based on our experience and data, we have come up with recommendations on the ideal number of ads to be placed on a page for both Desktop and Mobile formats.

Ideal Number of AdSense Ad Units on a Page for Desktop

A simple formula for bloggers is related to the number of words on your post.

So, in essence yes, you should put an ad for every 300 words in your post. The maximum number of ads on a page in the post body should, be capped at 5 to ensure page load times do not increase a lot. If you are using an infinite scroll format, then the maximum cap doesn’t apply since the user expects new content to load and is willing to wait anyway.

Note, that this recommendation is for the number of ads in the post body and doesn’t account for ads which you put in your sidebar. Usually, we recommend that bloggers place only one ad on your sidebar.

Ideal Number of AdSense Ad Units on a Page on Mobile

Mobile content is much more challenging on account of the limited real estate available. For mobile content, we recommend that you stick with the same formula above BUT limit the maximum number of ads to 2 if they are 300×250 sized units or 3 if they are 300×50 sized units. If you have infinitely scrolling content, then again these limits do not apply.

In summary, it is worth noting that a higher number of ad units doesn’t necessarily correlate to higher earnings since the revenue per user remains more or less constant. However, a higher number of ads on thin content will negatively affect the user experience, search rankings and also your AdSense earnings, so be careful about how and where you place your ads.

Do you think you will be changing the number of Ad Units on your pages now that Google AdSense has removed per page limits? Let us know using the comments section below.