I think I might have been smart-priced, it is very irritating. The lowest click I had seen was 13c, most of them were over 30c. Over the last two days they have been 3c or 4c.
This isn't exactly new news by any means. Smart pricing has been known for a while and Google has stated that smart pricing isn't limited to a single URL or website, but is account wide.
I realized that when I saw the date of the original post...someone must have dredged up an old post which is why I saw it for the first time I still would like to see the statistics behind it. I see a lot of claims that doing X or Y will help you out but no one ever provides proof that would be statistically verifiable. Course, the reason may be TOS...I'm running into that working on my own proof about filtering (with a verifiable bent) but TOS would prevent a release of effects on CTR and eCPM...earnings _should_ be permissible, but the key earning of Earning Per Click would NOT be. Still in this thread, the impact seems to be overall earnings which should be allowed to be disclosed.
I can't quote a year of statistics and don't have a hundred sites under my belt but I had a horrendous drop in earnings from a very stable three years base. There were only two sites in the account. The underperformer has much less traffic and at the moment a large percentage of that is from images (people coming to rip off pics, not click on ads). I flipped out the baby site and after 10 days my earnings are climbing back up again. Jenstar, your blog is excellent.
How far down the row does this go? Site level or Page level? Hypothetical situation: One site, but many pages. If you were able to determine low performing pages and remove ads from them, any guesses on results to earnings (eCPM, ePC) for the rest of the site.
My recommendation is this : If you have more then one website in your Adsense account, all the websites that have a CTR lower then 2%, remove them, or move them to another account.
Why? I don't think that CTR is any measure of conversion performance. You may have only 2% CTR but if 100% of those convert on the advertisers site, jackpot!
With all the uncertainties about smart pricing and what sites are responsible for triggering it, the best adsense strategy still remains building as many site as possible with the hope of catching as many clicks as possible. At the end of the day the high value clicks and low value clicks will eventually even out.
Well, I can't say this is smart pricing, but I'm making the same amount of money as I did last year at the same time (actually a little less) although I'm getting around twice as much organic traffic. :\
I think that may be more a result of the quality of the whole program starting to slip...what with more and more "5 words of text and an ad" websites cropping up
The way i have avoided smart pricing is by putting all low end performing sites in one account and all high end in another ,legitamitly.
As I said earlier or elsewhere, LOW CTR doesn't mean anything as far as performance when it comes to smart pricing. It may be low performing for YOU, but not necessarily for the Advertiser.
Trust me, it does. If you have a low (overall account) CTR (for example by having a heavy traffic website, that converts very very poor, in your account that holds other very well converting websites), then you diminish your earnings on websites that otherwise could've earned a lot more on the same clicks. Peace.
seems to me that CPM would be the best indicator of low vs high end, as it take s click through rate and price per click into account