In your experience, when is the best time to insert the ads?

[aprilm]

As soon as the site goes lives or after the site has ranked high for the targeted keyword? Does adding adsense have any affect on ranking power?

[paulgl]

You add ads as soon as you have a site with content.
Where did you hear otherwise?
Why would you not want to start making money?
Adsense has nothing to do with anything except adsense.

Don't put it on a site that shows "under construction." Park
the domain and add adsense.

Guess what? I just had a brain hiccup:
A parked domain is fair game for adsense. Talk about the
ultimate no content website!

Paul

[KevinA]

Yep agreed.. do it straight away as soon as your website content is ready. As far as im concerned, adsense dosnt affect ranking. Maybe if you have people you outsource to, wait until their work is done and then put up adsense - this is to avoid accidental clicks from people you outsource to, which could get your account banned. Just my 2 cents...

[bgmacaw]

I've tried it with waiting and immediately after adding the initial content and I haven't seen a difference.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Adsense bot will take some time to learn your site and match it up with search data. Not having search visitors and/or having a difficult to parse site can cause you to show lower earning, generic, ads, ads that don't match your content or even the dreaded Public Service Announcements (PSA's) that don't pay anything. That's why some people advocate waiting longer since placing the ads early can, but not always, result in lower payouts and a longer wait for higher payouts.