How to use your YouTube AdSense account for your website

We are helping dozens of new publishers per day to get started with Google AdSense on their sites. Our work involves figuring out why some of them already have a valid AdSense account, and ads still don’t show up. One of these edge cases where we looked for a long time until it finally hit us is an AdSense account that was verified for YouTube AdSense, but not for a website, yet.

How can I use my youtube adsense account for my website?

The simple answer is: add your website to it.

Find the slightly longer answer below in this tutorial.

Using AdSense with YouTube

I am often dealing with AdSense optimization for websites, so I first had to learn how AdSense connects to YouTube.

AdSense and YouTube belong to Google (= Alphabet Inc.), so the integration is rather easy.

There are requirements to your YouTube channel. They are currently 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months AND a minimum of 1,000 subscribers. These conditions might change. You can find the up-to-date version of them here.

To monetize your YouTube videos with ads you also need an AdSense account. You can create one here.

You can find all the other necessary steps and conditions in the Monetization tab in your YouTube account. Since the purpose of this article is to answer the question of how to use an AdSense account that was previously used for YouTube only with a new website, I am not going deeper into the details of the account creation for YouTube.

There is one important thing you’d need to understand about AdSense on YouTube: That kind of AdSense is a so-called Hosted AdSense-Account. Such an account type works on the connected page (e.g., youtube.com) only. There are other types of hosted AdSense accounts, like blogger.com, but running ads on your own domain is not covered by it.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get 2 add-ons for free!

* indicates required

Add your domain to the AdSense account used for websites

When you have your AdSense account set up as a hosted account for ads on YouTube, you would still need to get a non-hosted account for your website.

Well, you don’t need to get a new account. Just add your website to the AdSense account.

Follow these steps:

  • Log in to your AdSense account
  • Click on Ads in the navigation
  • Click on Other products
  • Click on Upgrade now and fill in the form
  • Implement the Verification and Auto ads code into your site. For WordPress, you can just follow this guide.

AdSense is going to look at your site, which can take a few days. Make sure you follow their content guidelines and program policies. Especially noteworthy is that you have a couple of posts an your site already.

Don’t worry about any consequences for your YouTube earnings if your AdSense account for the website is not approved. There is no account-wide penalty unless you break serious AdSense rules. Just keep on extending the content of your blog and an eye on the program policies.

And what I have wished to know before is that there is a manual in the AdSense Help. Good to know if any of the steps described here change.

Make it better

Increase your ad management skills without spending more time.
Join over 150,000 publishers and AdOpts increasing their ad revenue.