I'm so sorry if this topic already discussed before. I already made a search but the newest thread was 78 days ago... so I guess I should open a discussion about how to avoid being smart priced? The reason I opened this thread is that recently I saw that one of my site mostly got $0.01/clicks It was about $0.10-$0.30/click before. I even got lucky once, I saw one $2 (more or less) click So, my questions are : 1. What is smart price? 2. How do I know if I'm being smart priced by google? 3. How can I avoid of being smart priced? Many thanks in advance. Cheers, axlarry
You get smart priced when your ad clicks don't convert into sales. People clicking ads by mistake because of their location is probably the most common reason for clicks not converting for publishers.
there's nothing you can do, really. This is why the whole concept of it sucks. It's not your fault, as a publisher, if clicks are not converting.
How do google track the converting rate? I mean, say someone clicks on one of the ads then landed into advertiser site.... how do google know what happen next?
I think advertisers report their conversion rates to google. The whole concept sucks. No matter what you do, you will still get smart priced. I've tried changing the location, layout, colors and number of adunits, but I'm still not able to get out of the smart pricing filter.
So, you can bet that MFAAs honestly report all those clicks that your visitors make on their ads as conversions. What else are they going to report, they usually have no product, so they have to report the clicks they get as conversions.. Yeah, right...all the more reason to filter them...just might help you stave off smart pricing.
Its high time we look at alternatives for adsense. Its not worth staying with adsense if we get a CTR of less than 2% and CPC of less than 10 cents. I've been running text ads instead of google on some of my websites which have a low CTR and CPC. These websites generate 2X revenue of what I used to earn with adsense.
Google gave the example (in a podcast interview recently) of a photo gallery vs a camera site. The same ad would be priced lower for the gallery. It seemed to make perfect sense to them. Hello nickel clicks.
That really doesn't make any sense isn't it? I really wanted to know how exactly google my conversion rate Yeah, that's perhap explained why matt cutts acting strange about selling links and blog posts
The point is even if its not a MFA, the advertiser wouldn't report high conversions to google. Reason - If he does so, he would be paying more $$$ per click for the same ads that he puts on our websites. Think of it from an advertisers point of view. As an advertsier, I would rather not report my conversions to google and pay lesser $$$ per click, rather than report conversions and pay more $$$ per click. When smart pricing is applied, google doesnt take a greater share of revenue, infact google makes lesser revenue. When smart pricing filter hits a website, publisher makes lesser revenue, google makes lesser revenue, advertiser is charged lesser $$$ per click.
For an MFA a conversion would probably be a click on its adsense ads. Conversion doesn't always need to be a sale or a lead.
So adwords advertisers now report their conversion rate to google ? Since when ? And that's assuming adwords advertisers all sell things in their landing page.
I don't believe this...WAY too much room for cheating on the side of the Adwords publisher, I doubt Google would rely on the honor system for this. The point in my post is that there is no automatic way for Google to consider clicks on MFAA sites as conversions. Well, there IS, obviously, but if this were the method used, Google would be admitting to condoning these types of sites. More likely the MFAA owners could set up a bogus conversion path which would never be reached. Perhaps some Adwords runner could step in and explain how conversions are reported?
I think one key point is to NOT follow the old advice of making your ads blend well. The only purpose of that old trick was to get more accidental clicks, but now that is proven to hurt you more than increase your earnings.
Another noob question : where did you guys know about this "smart price" term? Was it officially announced by google?
There is no way for google to track conversions, unless advertisers report it themselves. They track conversions automatically only in the newly launched CPA program. But the CPA ad code is different and they have the conversion tracking mechanism embedded in the code. That's my best guess
If that's true, that is an egregious oversight on Google's part...there is every incentive for Advertisers to misrepresent the number of conversions.
Over the last month I have come to the conclusion that there are much much much better ways of monetising sites that using GoogleAds. Not suitable for many types of sites though. My advice is don't build MFAs, you're wasting you're talent. Notting