Provide relevant ads (things like more content, good structer like heading tags and page titles help alot) and place ads in a way which users will not "accidentally" (looking like navigation is ok, but putting them in places where they're real close to non-relevant images etc. will hurt long term) click. You get smartpriced because ads don't convert for the advertiser. If you make sure people are clicking them on purpose they will convert more often. You'll likely get a lower CTR but better CPC resulting in what should (usually) be more income for everyone (you and the advertiser). All those people focusing on non-relevant images next to ads and 50% of the fold covered with ads usually get smartpriced first. Seriously, the best way to maintain high paying clicks is to wrap ads around your content, not content around your ads. Some people disagree, but this is what I've experienced.
There really isn't anything you can do. Google owns you. If they want to give you crappy CPC then they will. You just have to hope for the best.
Is this a joke or you recoomend other advertising programs? And guys, again what about advertisers not selling any product or service? Clicks on their ads will just bring them traffic which is what they want.So smart pricing shouldn't be applied here..,,right?
The only way to avoid being smart-priced is making your ads ones that YOUR users will be interested in. If you run a site about "computers games" make sure your content is specific and focused so that your Google Ads display ads about "computer games" - not only will this increase your CTR because people came to your site looking for info about "computer games" this will increase the likelihood that someone clicking the ads will actually take action on the advertisers site because they are actually interested in the topic that the ad was about. If you have a site about "computer games" but your know that the Earning Per Click is three times as much for ads about "computers" or "laptops" so your start slipping in those terms to get ads about "computers" and "laptops" not only will your CTR drop because your visitors aren't as interested but their likelihood of taking action on the advertiser's site is that much less as well so you will be smart-priced and you may actually be doing worse off optimising for the terms that supposedly were going to bring you three times the revenue.
Nice reply Burta , thanks. but still many of the interested visitors are interested probably in just reading and surfing a site and not buying a service or product. May be that's why google is considering CPA ads now. However to satisfy advertisers , it woulds be on the expense of publishers and vice versa, so I don't know how can google solve this problem.!!
Think of Smart Pricing as a conversion ratio. How many clicks does it take to produce an action? Based on this model, there are two approaches for dealing with smart pricing. The first way is to make your visitors more willing to perform the action after they click away from your site. Call this the pre-selling approach. The second way is to send fewer visitors (clicks) that won't perform the action. Call this the traffic qualifying (or filtering) approach. However, I'm not sure that Smart Pricing is entirely action based. Google may have other ways to measure traffic quality after the click, as measured by the google toolbar and google analytics. In fact, I think that having a variety of after-the-click traffic quality scoring methods will be essential to combating click fraud and low quality traffic and keeping advertisers opted in to the content network. I think no matter how quality is measured after the click, the two general approaches will work. Qualify and pre-sell.
I agree with you and thats what i am doing these days, getting high paying clicks. Instead of placing images next to ads, place content that would help you guys a lot.
use section targetting google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsupport%2Fadsense%2Fbin%2Fanswer.py%3Fanswer%3D23168&ei=AR25RP34NqOM2QKJ5tXlDA&sig2=lvQxJKy1VnSGD6MSg_AwVA
Do not post 1.000.000.000 forum signatures with unrelevant links to your MFA sites. How comes? Strider Search Defender is used by MSN and Google will use something similar in the nearby future.