AdSense approved — what to do in the first week

The guides stop at the wrong place

Search for AdSense advice and almost all of it ends at approval. That is where
the traffic is, so that is what gets written — but approval is a one-day event
and the decisions that set your revenue for the next year get made in the week
afterwards.

Here is what that week is actually for.

Day one: ads.txt, and verify it

AdSense shows your line in the account under Sites. Put it at
https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt and then — this is the part people skip — load
that URL and read the raw response.

You are checking for one specific failure: a host with no /ads.txt returning
your styled 404 page with a 200 status. It looks fine in a browser. AdSense
may even report the file as present. Every exchange parses the body, finds no
valid records, and treats your inventory as unauthorised.

This is the highest-consequence item of the week because it fails silently and
completely. The full guide is here.

Days two and three: place few units, deliberately

The instinct after approval is to turn everything on. Resist it for a week, for
two reasons.

Policy. Auto ads place units on every template they can reach — login pages,
empty search results, thank-you pages, tag archives with one post. A page with
almost no content carrying ad units is the "valuable inventory: no content"
pattern, which is a policy problem rather than a revenue disappointment.

Learning. If you turn on twelve placements at once and the RPM is
disappointing, you have no idea which ones are working. Two or three deliberate
placements teach you something. Twelve teach you nothing.

Days four to seven: measure before you optimise

Record RPM, impressions and pageviews daily for a full week and change nothing.

This is dull and it is the difference between optimising and guessing. Without a
baseline, every later change is an opinion — you will move a unit, see a better
day, and conclude the move worked when it was Tuesday.

Two things to know while you watch:

• The first few days are unrepresentative. Serving ramps up as the system
  learns your inventory. Do not judge placement from day two.
• Look at daily numbers, not the running total. The running total only ever
  goes up and tells you nothing.

Read the policies once, properly

An hour now against an account-level action later. Most of it will be obvious,
but two areas catch honest publishers:

Invalid traffic does not require intent. Your own clicks count. So do clicks
from a placement that sits directly under a navigation item where people tap by
accident — every visitor real, every click a mistake, and the data cannot tell
the difference.

Content policy applies site-wide. One old post that crosses a line is
assessed against the whole account, not just that page.

Decide how you will find out it broke

This is the item everyone leaves for later, and it is the one that costs the
most.

Ask yourself: if your ads.txt were overwritten by a theme update tonight, how
would you find out?

The honest default answer is "the monthly number comes in low, and maybe I work
out why". That is six weeks of degraded revenue before the investigation even
starts — and by then the change that caused it is buried under a dozen others.

The same question applies to an ad unit that stops rendering after a plugin
update, and to a policy notice sitting in an account you check monthly.

None of these announce themselves. Every one of them is invisible in the numbers
you normally look at, right up until the month closes.

That is the gap this whole site exists in: approval is a checklist, and keeping
what you were approved for is a monitoring problem. Whether you solve it with
Monetific or a calendar reminder and a bookmark
matters much less than solving it in week one, while it is still cheap.