Sorry for asking this stupid question which I think most of those here know the answer (seems only me who doesn't know ...) But I still want to know what exactly "smart pricing" is? I have heard from other DP members that this will increase their earnings but how? Can anyone help give me a precise description for "smart pricing"? I am getting confused.
If your site is converting poorly for the advertisers (a TOTALLY silly factor for ad pricing in my opinion, since you can just fake low conversions for cheap content clicks), they'll ultimately lower the amount you get per click arbitrarily. An example of which is when you have a site giving you dollar clicks for 1 week, then suddenly from there on in, you're receiving 0.3 and 0.5c clicks forever. The general consensus (with the most evidence to back it up) is that smart pricing occurs on an account wide basis, so one poorly performing site may smart price an entire account. My theory is that they've updated it to work on a keyword basis (which would be most logical, and helps every party get the best amount, including Google's bottom line).
I know! I'm not one to base things purely on conjecture, but everything I'm doing leads me to think so!
Well, who knows, you might turn out to be right. Adsense will always look out for #1, so if their profits start to drop, I doubt they'll be against tweaking their own system to benefit them and not bother to tell us peons about it.
The worst part is we're playing a game where the ref won't tell us the rules, and at the end of the day their bottom line is the most important thing to them. Smart pricing an entire account (even if it has 1000+ other extremely profitable sites) seems self-defeating for Google to pursue, especially with their emphasis on relevancy and efficiency in all their other areas.
Thanks Art. So to say it in other words. Does it means that smart pricing only lowers publisher's earning?
Absolutely! (although you could argue it would raise others' earnings as the Good ads won't fill their daily quota, so they may raise the payouts for non smart priced sites)
Smart pricing is just another way of keeping the Advertisers happy, after all it's their money that's paying all of us publishers
I think the thing with a whole account getting smartpriced because of one site/channel performing badly is just lazyness from Google...easy to punish the whole account It's really annoying. I also really dislike the whole conversions issue. What is a conversion really? Well it totally varies. I for one never click an ad and then buy a product directly, I might bookmark the site and return later to make my purchase. I am sure most people do the same, and that won't count as a conversion.