As a freelance writer, sooner or later, you are going to want to try and monetize some of the writings you publish online. One of the easiest places to start earning with your websites is to publish ads from Google’s AdSense. Along the way, you may encounter and configure Cloudflare to speed up the websites where you publish. If you have a website that relies on Google AdSense for monetization, and Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network (CDN) and security service, for speed and stability, you should be concerned if using both will affect your ad revenue.
Does Cloudflare interfere with AdSense?
The short answer is no. Cloudflare does not interfere with AdSense in any way that would harm your ad performance or revenue. In fact, Cloudflare can actually improve your AdSense performance by speeding up your website loading time, reducing bounce rate, and enhancing user experience.
Cloudflare works by caching your website’s static content (such as images, CSS, and JavaScript) on its global network of servers, and serving it to your visitors from the nearest location. This reduces the load on your original server and makes your website faster and more reliable.
AdSense, on the other hand, is a dynamic service that serves personalized ads to your visitors based on their location, device, browsing history, and other factors. AdSense ads are not cached by Cloudflare, because they are always fetched from Google’s servers when a visitor requests your webpage. These external requests would have to be cached by Google or AdSense rather than your local pages.
Therefore, using Cloudflare does not affect the delivery or display of AdSense ads on your website. You will still get the same ads as you would without Cloudflare, and your visitors will still see the same ads as they would without Cloudflare.
Does Cloudflare steal ad clicks from AdSense?
Another common concern that website owners have is whether Cloudflare steals ad clicks from AdSense. This is based on a misunderstanding of how Cloudflare works.
Cloudflare does not modify or alter the content of your website in any way. It only caches and serves the content that you provide to it. It does not inject any ads of its own or replace any of your ads with its own.
When a visitor clicks on an AdSense ad on your website, they are redirected to the advertiser’s website through Google’s servers. Cloudflare has no involvement in this process and does not intercept or redirect any ad clicks.
Therefore, using Cloudflare does not affect the tracking or reporting of AdSense clicks or revenue. You will still get credited for every valid click that you generate, and you will still see the same data in your AdSense dashboard as you would without Cloudflare. And it won’t mess up your SEO either.
Why is using Cloudflare with AdSense a good idea?
Using Cloudflare with AdSense does not have any negative impact on your ad performance or revenue. On the contrary, it can have several positive benefits for your website and your visitors.
Some of the advantages of using Cloudflare with AdSense are:
- Faster website loading time: By caching and serving your static content from its global network of servers, Cloudflare can reduce the latency and bandwidth consumption of your website. This can improve your website speed, which is an important factor for user experience and SEO.
- Lower bounce rate: A faster website can also reduce the bounce rate of your visitors, which is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page. A lower bounce rate means more engaged visitors who are more likely to view multiple pages and click on more ads.
- Better security: Cloudflare also provides various security features for your website, such as SSL encryption, DDoS protection, firewall rules, bot management, and more. These features can protect your website from malicious attacks, spam, and abuse, which can harm your reputation and revenue.
- Higher availability: Cloudflare also ensures that your website is always online and accessible to your visitors. If your origin server goes down or becomes unreachable for any reason, Cloudflare can serve a cached version of your website until it comes back online. This can prevent downtime and lost revenue.
What are the alternatives to Cloudflare?
If you are looking for a CDN and security service other than Cloudflare, there are several alternatives that you can consider. Some of the popular ones are:
- Sucuri: Sucuri is a comprehensive website security platform that offers CDN, firewall, malware removal, monitoring, backup, and more. Sucuri is compatible with Adsense and other ad networks.
- StackPath: StackPath is a high-performance CDN that offers edge computing, security, DNS, monitoring, and more. StackPath is compatible with AdSense and other ad networks.
- Fastly: Fastly is an advanced CDN that offers edge cloud computing, security, streaming media delivery, image optimization, serverless functions, and more. Fastly is compatible with AdSense and other ad networks.
How does Cloudflare affect other ads like Ezoic and Mediavine?
Ezoic and Mediavine are two popular platforms that help website owners optimize their ad revenue by testing different layouts, placements, sizes, formats, and networks of ads on their websites. They also provide CDN, security, analytics, and other features for their users. These ad networks are alternatives to AdSense.
If you are using Ezoic or Mediavine on your website, you can still use Cloudflare as well. However, you need to make sure that you configure them correctly to avoid any conflicts or issues.
The main thing to remember is that Ezoic and Mediavine need to have access to your website’s HTML code in order to insert and test different ads on your pages. Therefore, you need to configure Cloudflare’s HTML caching feature, to allow Ezoic and Mediavine to modify your HTML code.
To disable Cloudflare’s HTML caching feature, you need to create a page rule in your Cloudflare dashboard that matches your website’s URL and set the Cache Level to Bypass. This will tell Cloudflare not to cache any HTML content on your website and allow Ezoic and Mediavine to work properly.