I have been smart priced for about 2 months now, nothing I do makes an impact. I tried ridding it out but it's not working my income is down significantly!
It might not be smart pricing, it might be the niche you are in is down overall. Are your ads targeted well? Maybe you could use section targeting to get into a slightly higher paying niche.
You are under the mistaken belief that you can "wait out" smartpricing. You can't. But you can "fix" it this way: Site A is giving you the most clicks (and thus, the most money), but it is most likely (99% of the time) the one responsible for giving you smartpricing because all those clicks you are generating aren't converting. Thus, in order to remove smartpricing from your account, you would have to remove ads from Site A. Of course you see the problem: without Site A, you aren't getting the vast majority of your clicks, so even if smartpricing was removed, you still won't make what you were making 2 months ago. That's the Catch-22. The only way I've found to get around this is to switch my highest click site over to another ad network and leave the rest with Adsense for targeted ads. With Site A no longer a factor in the Adsense conversion/smartpricing equation, the rest of my sites, and my account, are no longer smartpriced. It's a delicate balance, but it CAN work.
This is one of the real anamolies of adsense. I think the performance should be related to individual sites. If one site does not convert, I don't think another should be affected.
From my smart pricing FAQ What is Smart Pricing? Smart pricing is an attempt by Google to ensure that AdWords advertisers are getting a good Return On Investment for their advertising. Usually when an advertiser places an add the y want whoever clicked that ad to take some action such as buy a product or sign up for a newsletter. Google tries to determine if a user from your site is likely to result in the desired action or not. If not, they lower the price of click from your site. Here is an explanation from Google (written from an advertisers point of view):
my new gaming site is getting very poor results, like 5 cents a click...must just be a horrible paying niche. 5 clicks has made me 18 cents. This is on my Mario site, anyone know if it is possible to increase the amount per click?
I would try to target things differently. For example you wii page is showing Mario ads. I would think that if you could get ads for wii up there instead they would pay a whole bunch more.
Create a page with wii console info, then another page with wii game reviews, another with wii accessory info, etc., link all of these page to your index page.
waiting for smartpricing to disappear is a sure way to make smartpricing stay. what you have to do : -find uout why you're smartpriced, ie which is the site and within the site which are the ads that are not converting. basically, that would be the ads that are tricking the user into clicking thinking it's not an ad, for exemple it could be ads looking like a menu or something of the kind, resulting in a lot of click but very little conversion. -once you have found the guilty ads, modify them or remove them so that the visitors won't click on them without being tricked into it. then, in a couple of weeks, smartpricing will get away
Do all the standard on-page SEO stuff. Put "Wii console" in the title of the page, in a "h1" tag, bold it, etc. If you still get mario ads, use AdSense content targeting to get rid of the "mario" keyword on you page.
Is smart-pricing removed following a manual review, or what? Otherwise, what does the system do? Does it say "I haven't seen an impression from the smart-priced site in X days, so I am lifting the smart pricing?"
Like almost everything else that Google does, it's an algorithmic thing. If Google thinks click from your sites are not converting, you won't get paid as much for them. If for some reason things change and Google thinks the clicks are converting well, there won't be a penalty.
this reason being simply that clicks are again converting well. it's not just goog thinking, it's goog analysing the stats (automatically of course) and once the stats are above a given threshold the penalty is removed. so it's not like an unknown reason all mysterious thing. it is if your ads are converting poorly, you're smartpriced. if they are not, you're not smartpriced.
I disagree here. I think Google goes beyond just simply measuring conversions. Not all advertisers give Google conversion information, so it's impossible to use this alone. I think Google looks at the conversions they know about and then extrapolates this to all sites.