I have a general question here for the adsense gurus. Once an account has been hit with smart pricing, is it possible to correct this? IE one poorly performing forum pulls down the payments across the higher earning ads, will removing the forum from the loop leaving only the high earning sites put things back as they should be? I know that in theory it 'should' but there are variables like over what period does google work out smart pricing? If it is performance to date then that is an end to it really. But if it is month on month then that is a whole different ballgame. Anyone with experience of this?
It's my understanding that Adsense calculates smart-pricing on a week-by-week basis. (Then again I could be wrong, but this is what I've read.) And yes, theoretically you should be able to remove smart-pricing by removing ads from the poorly converting site. The problem with this is that the poorly converting site will also be the site that makes you the most money (they may convert poorly, but they GET clicks), so removing ads from it to increase the CPC along the rest of your network doesn't really make sense. You can't remove ads from a forum that isn't getting clicks to impact smart-pricing because smart-pricing doesn't take impressions into consideration, only clicks to conversion for the advertiser ratio. So that means removing ads from the site that gets the most clicks. See the problem?
Perhaps put another method of advertising on the poorly converting site (YPN anyone?). The best of both worlds!
So it is conversions that affect smart pricing not impressions to conversions? I intend changing the forum to rotating affiliate adverts nyhow, as the trials of the affiliate stuff earned me almost 10 times what the adsense did. I was just curious if it would alter the smart pricing thats all. Thanks for the imput all.
Its difficult to tell whether someone has been smart prcied or just low ads being clicked. I guess the best way to tell about smart pricing would be if someone has had their income fall substantially for a sustained period of time.
Clicks on one site went from $4 a click to $0. 50 or lower, so I guessed it was smart pricing. I might be wrong of course, as there is no way of knowing.
i think it`s easy to see if you`re smartpriced or not ... but i don`t know how you can heal this ... maybe make major changes to the website and continuously add content to that website
I don't believe smart pricing works this way that one site affects another because I have site with clicks always higher than dollar and other site with clicks one week averaging couple of cents and other week averaging quite higher even 10x ! In my opinion smart pricing is site-based and does not affect all your pages. Of course I can be wrong here because I really don't know how it works .... and yes like jackburton said I see weekly based click prices ....
about how much $ per click do you get when your smart priced?... cause my myspace resource site was geting .10-.20 $ per click and yesterday it was .05 and today .07 :'(
Well, I'm going by what Adsense told Jensense themselves, and I don't think they would lie to her, do you?
Yep smartpricing affects accounts not sites. It is a PUBLISHER quality control not a site based scheme.
Hello Old Welsh Guy I know this is silly and goes againt what most people think, but I've seen the following trend occur over and over with each new site I put (fairly regularly too). The new sites will earn some great clicks initially ($0.50-$2.00 range) for about a week or so, in which I'll use some simple AdWords to drive traffic and and the arbitrage works quite nicely for a while. Once the site gets into organic listings, I'll drop the arbitrage (and around this time the click values will go down). Maybe I'm absolutely crazy, but smart pricing could work on a keyword/niche basis per account ala AdWords quality score? Take this hypothetical into consideration - your site displays BLUE widget ads, people click through but they don't convert too well and perform poorly, dropping the price of those ads. When it comes time to displaying more ads, the blue widget ads are now priced lower than RED widget ads, so they'll display red widget ads until they drop in price as well, until it reaches an equilibrium. It would make sense this way since Google wouldn't be cutting itself out of profit, it would also maintain relevancy, AND it would optimize the ads on site via smart pricing to display the most relevant ads. Only when ALL COLOURED widget ads are converting poorly do you notice the terrible pricing you're getting. In which case you're just dealing with untargeted traffic. I've been following this model and it's working out really nicely, generating info based sites, getting organic traffic and then leaving them forever. I just need more/faster/better/cheaper article writers now! I'm aiming for 500+ by the end of the year...
Yes, smart pricing adjusts once a week. Yes, your entire account is smart priced the same, it is not site by site. EPC depends on the market area, not a fluctuation of site-by-site smart pricing. So because your EPC varies per site does not mean you are smart priced differently, it just means that advertisers are willing to spend a different EPC for each.