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Technical Requirements

To make the review process as fast as possible, please test your implementation thoroughly and ensure that it complies with the Terms and Conditions.

Each item listed below corresponds to a requirement that will be checked during the review process. Please verify your implementation meets each requirement before submitting your review request.

Caution: If the technical review determines that changes to your implementation are necessary, there will be at least a 48 hour delay between when we provide feedback and re-review your application.

The technical review covers the following categories:

Account Creation

  • Your implementation must be able to create new Google AdSense accounts.

    Use the createAccount request to create new Google AdSense accounts. Your software must then be able to parse the response from the AdSense API service and make any necessary changes to your service.

  • Your implementation must also be able to handle the case where a user tries to create an existing Google AdSense account.

    Your implementation should be able to recognize the error and give the user some useful direction on what to do next. For example, you might link the user to your account association page.

  • You must have a unique, valid, and public URL for review.

    The URLs that you submit for review must exist and not be your top-level URL. This URL should have content that is created or controlled by the user for which the AdSense account is created.

Account Association

  • Your implementation must be able to associate with existing Google AdSense accounts.

    Your users may already have a Google AdSense account. The response from associateAccount (the association request) will be the same as that from creating a new Google AdSense account, so you should be able to reuse your code that processes the response from a creation request.

  • Your software must be able to handle the case where the user tries to associate an account that does not exist.

    In this situation, you might redirect the user to where they can create an account through your service.

  • Your application must be able to handle the case where the user tries to associate an account but provides the wrong phone and postal code verifications.

    The AdSense API requires only the postal code or the phone number hint. Some developers choose to require both, as they believe giving the option of providing one or the other could confuse users. This practice is acceptable.

Change of Associated Account

  • Your implementation must let the user change the account they have associated with you.

    Typically, you can almost entirely reuse the code you use for associating accounts. The flow presented to the user may be slightly different, but the back-end process will probably be very similar to the process when the user associates an existing Google AdSense account not registered with your service.

    The AdSense API does not provide a method to dissociate with a publisher, although such a method may be provided in the future. A user can terminate the association through the Google AdSense web site. You can choose to keep track of all Google AdSense accounts a user has associated with you or just be aware of the most recent association.

Account and Association Statuses

  • You should notify users if they have steps left to complete before earning revenue

    Use getAssociationStatus and getApprovalStatus (or the bulk variations of these methods). If the association is Active and the account is Approved, the user is ready to earn revenue. If not, you should notify the user that they need to follow the instructions in the email they received from Google AdSense before they can begin earning revenue.

    One exception is if the association is Active and the account is Pending_Approval. Here you should let the user know that they need to wait for Google to review and approve the AdSense application they submitted.

    Instead of checking each time the page is viewed, you should request the status at most once per day (using the bulk requests) and then provide a button or a link that allows the user to manually refresh the status.

Implementation of Ad Code

  • Your software must implement the display of ad code.

    Whenever possible and applicable, ad code display should be implemented automatically or through a wizard where the user has some simple options relating to style and placement of ads. The user should not have to copy JavaScript code and paste it into pages on your service.

  • Each unique snippet of ad code must be obtained from a call to an ad code generation method.

    Use requests such as generateAdCode, generateSearchBoxCode, and getReferralData. You are not allowed to generate a new snippet by manipulating one that you already have. You should not call one of the generation methods each time a page is viewed on your site. You should call the generation methods to create the snippet, then store it on your servers and use this cached copy on your pages.

  • The ad code must update if the user changes their associated account.

    If your implementation uses several snippets, it may be a good idea to create an asynchronous process to retrieve the new snippets since this process could take a few moments.