Hello fellow DP'ers Over the past month I've been doing some testing on different methods of avoiding smart pricing on my account and have come to a few conclusions. Now please take these with a pinch of salt as they are my personal opinions and experiences and may not apply to you. I first noticed the effect of smart pricing when my average click fell by around 60%. However, what struck me as strange is that my account still managed to generate roughly the same amount of income (give or take 10%). My traffic had remained constant over this period so fluctuations in traffic were not an issue. It seems that as soon as my avg click went up, my CTR would go down, and when my CTR went up my avg click would go down. It was as if Google had decided that for my account the CPM should always be $XX.XX regardless. This led me to think that for my sites there was a "publisher / Adsense / Google quality" score that was attached. Now I realise that the basis for the smart price theory is that if clicks from my site don't convert for advertisers that my account is smart priced. I have been a supporter of the click/conversion theory and I still am, however I don't believe that all advertisers use Google Analytics and therefore not all conversion rate information is available to Google. Now just stop and think for a moment. You're a massive search engine running a highly organised and complicated search algorithm to determine quality and trust for most sites on the internet. You also have a revenue stream that comes from publishers showing your adds. Wouldn't it make sense to combine that information? I know I would. By doing this you could easily assign a CPM value any AdSense site in your index based on whether or not the site was in the sandbox, just average, or an authority site. You could also assign Adsense trust based on all the factors that affect your sites ranking in the SERPS like incoming and outgoing link quality. So where's the proof? Well, I have an authority site that ranks well in the SERPS and is a major source of income. I have never placed AdSense on this site as it earns more through traditional methods then AdSense could hope to bring in. I presumed that if my authority site was added to my AdSense account than it's trust as a whole would increase and lift smart pricing from my account. The result? The chart below is my CPM over 30 days. Can you can guess the days that AdSense was shown on my authority site? Please also consider that this increase was account wide, I have around 7 sites in my AdSense account and I saw clicks for brand new sites that are currently in the sandbox go from $0.0X to $X.XX Essentially what I'm saying is that you should take a holistic view of your AdSense Account and Google. Smart pricing affects entire accounts, so its the entire account that you will need to improve. Do this by improving your existing sites, remove spammy sites and/or adding authority sites. If your being smart priced, go and work on the sort of things that improve your position and trust in the eyes of Google first. Get the quality links, write the good content, *insert white hat SEO advice here*. Then worry about the common "how many adds do I show?" or "please check my placement" later. By creating more "trustworthy" sites you may find your AdSense account more "trustworthy" to Google. And who knows, you may find yourself more valuable to the hungry giant and may even get thrown a few VERY tasty scraps from the internet's dinner table.
Hmmm .. interesting findings ... but Im not so sure .. I too have been playing around with different scenerios trying to figure out the smart pricing methodology (if any), and many of the points you observed (esp. about smart pricing being acct-wide) do not necessarily hold true for me. the advice you give regarding building better sites is of course true, but rhetorical at the same time - this is just commmon sense, but I guess some people are a bit thicker than others when it comes to grasping this stuff ... PM me if you are interested in swapping some notes and/or theories GG
Well, I would say that two days aren't long enough to get good statistics on. Part of what you are seeing is simply that for google ads that get few clicks have to pay a higher CPC than ads that get more clicks. So that means that in effect publishers are roughly payed cpm. That explains your original question. To your conclusion that pricing on one website is influenced by the pricing on another - I very much doubt it. There is no good economic reason for that to happen. I have a website with different sections on different topics - some more related to my central theme, some less. Each section has a typical CTR and a typical CPM. These differ by as much as 100%. On one and the same website, one and the same account. I think it's just that some subjects within my niche are getting more targeted ads then others.
john chow has a nice post on the topic, check it out over http://www.johnchow.com/using-the-competitive-ad-filter-to-increase-adsense-earnings/
I actually agree with the OP. I've also noticed the same thing on my account for afew weeks of experimenting. I have afew spammy sites which I didnt have adsense on originally now that I activated those my Adsense earning went down. Wheres my traffic was the same.