What a ridiculous system. I was having two sites with adsense on. One of them got about 4 times the traffic of the other. Ever since I removed the adsense from the one with more traffic my earnings are up. Yes thats right, Adsense is now getting only 20% of my previous impressions but paying me more. I think its quite ridiculous that Google applies Smartpricing to whole accounts. They could have the traffic from the other site too (at a lower price of course) but since it drags down my account they are now getting only a fraction? Does that make sense from their perspective (get less pay more)? I think they really need to spring into action and fix that problem so it is site specific and not global to the entire account.
same experience here. i suspect that if a site has high impressions but low ecpm, it triggers s/p in the entire account.
I'm not entirely convinced that the sp penalty is account wide.. since I'm heavily smart priced currently on most of my gaming related sites, but one automotive site amongst all the gaming ones still performs well...
It probably is but they may use weights: SiteA is smartpriced (-70%) All other sites get affected by 70%. This means SiteB gets (-70%*0.7=49%) lower prices. The percentage may depend on the traffic numbers of both sites. What I am trying to say is they may not all be affected the same way, but from what I can tell by looking at my stats something really improved (a lot actually).
I think they should treat every site as separate case or else allow separate account for every site putting all the sites in the same basket is a stunt that webmasters do to survive while Google doesn't care for this does Google really care more for advertisers other than publishers ?
ive always done affiliate stuff and only (somewhat) recently switched to adsense... is there a way to verify (for sure) you are being smart priced? I have some sites that average literally like $.05 per click and I'm wondering if I fall into this category.
I don't think there is a way. Your earnings will drop I guess. If you start with $0.05 it may just be your niche. Its kind of like poking around in the dark trying to hit the cat. You might get lucky or you might hit some old chinese vase (making things worse). I think smartpricing is something of a mystery that is blamed for a lot of poor performance because people don't know anything about it. I don't even know how it works. Supposedly it works by feedback from the advertiser (does your traffic convert). But in that case a low CTR would be better (ads are not blended too well, so peole don't klick by accident, only if they are interested). Then again many people say that low CTR can trigger smartpricing in the first place (which is totally contradictory to the theroy). Overall its like Schroedingers cat. It is both alive and dead in the box and only when you open it will the actual state be determined (measurement affects outcome in quantum mechanics). Its like that with google. Noone knows until they check, but someone else who checks gets a different result. Who knows. So I ran a test on the other website (the high traffic one). I gave 5k impressions to Chitika and didn't get a single click (WTF? - before you ask I can relate my site to a product category). I may just pull ads all together (for international traffic and give the US traffic to YPN) or put some more Amazon on (at least there are some pennies coming from Amazon, even though its not great). Commission Junction doesn't convert well either and quite frankly they suck (their webservices are a joke, I really have trouble invoking the javascript routines). Basically each site is different. It takes a lot of playing around to make them work. Don't think Adsense is everything for every site. Some do good and some don't and drag down your account.
hi guys i believe i've been smartpriced twice, and i could see it on all my sites. i think there is one good reason why google smartprices your whole account and not just the badly behaving site : if they smartprice you, it's because one of your site is bullshit (somehow people clic on adds they're not interested in), and what does google want is no bullshit sites. if you had one good site and one bullshit site, and google smartpriced the bullshit site only, probably you wouldn't care, and the bullshit site would still bullshit around while the good site would earn you $. however, if, as they do, the whole account is smaprtpriced and revenue drops, then you have a strong incentive to fix the problem, either by telling the bullshit site to stop bullshiting around, or by closing it altogether adsensewise. the result, as far as google is concerned and as far as advertisers are concerned, is much less bullshit sites around. this, i believe, is a very good reason to smartprice the whole account versus only the poorly converting sites.
Yeah sure. Google doesn't give a rats ass about the quality of any site (or how else would you explain tons of MFA sites that they happily allow to advertise using adwords). How do you explain this: http://www.google.com/domainpark/ (I can see a lot of quality in that program ). As if Google cares about quality , really good one. You got me smiling.
How would anyone know. I would speculate however they can smartprice you until you are not even making 0.01 anymore. Today I am somehow getting up to 10 times my usual click value (not 10 times earnings since the other site is now contributing any clicks). Honestly, I draw the line at 0.05. Anything below and I remove adsense (no matter how much money it makes). I consider my visitors worth more to me if they stay on my site. Consider this: Most advertisers pay more than that to get a visitor, why should you give him/her away for less? Rather come up with some other idea to monetize (offer them a product).
I've moved several sites to YPN because of bad pricing on Google. YPN still pays higher for certain niches, others it's just crap. BTW I love the Schroedinger's cat reference.
Smartpricing remains a bit of a mystery to me, but from what I understand of it...it isn't so much about your traffic or CTR but about how many conversions you send to the advertiser. An advertiser is selling something, they don't care if you send visitors, they care if you send customers. Google is a business, their primary customers are advertisers. As such, they cater more to the advertisers than the publishers. Unless you do adwords yourself, when was the last time you gave google any money? Google is trying to give the advertisers that pay googles bills, the most effective advertising possible. While it seems unfair to us as publishers, it certainly makes sense if you are an advertiser. Don't get me wrong, I don't like smartpricing, and I don't even know for sure if I have been smartpriced or not. If I were an advertiser though, I would probably be in favor of knowing that my ad money is going to sites that send me paying customers, after all, that is the point of advertising isn't it? The best information that I have found regarding smartpricing is a year old, but probably still relevant http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html
Lol. Glad you liked it. Google strikes me as mysterious as quantum mechanics and there are at least as many people trying to figure Google out these days. Exactly. Thats why I am thinking about changing the game and becoming an advertiser. If you are paying, you are always right Actually I should have a made for yahoo site and get my traffic from google adwords lowballing all hard working publishers. Yep, thats what I should be doing. But NOOOOO, I am a stupid publisher who thinks that hard work will pay off, LOL. When am I ever going to learn. I was born a worker and I will die a worker. Meanwhile Google allows adsense on empty domains (if you hold enough of them), MFA sites with nothing but adsense ... And we wonder why Advertisers only opt for search ads? I wouldn't want my ads on those MFA or domain sites either (users basically just click to leave that site, they are not interested in your ad).
I think smart-pricing by account is dumb, by I suspect they know people would just set up redirects and use other tricks to avoid smart pricing in the same account. if it was just by site.
I dont agree that a bad CTR means bad site. For example my site my the most pageviews has the worse CTR... this is because the content is good and our users dont need to click on the ads. I think I will take adsense off that site now, taking into the above.. Matt
I don't like the name "smart pricing" it's dumb and I don't like it, I've always this feeling that the part not paid just go in Google's pockets, not that the advertizer pays less per click, did you see it mentionned on the adwords side of things?