Is there a way of avoiding smart pricing? Also, can anyone give me a pedantic explanation as how it works or let me know of a thread which includes one?
There is no sure fire way to avoid smart pricing. I know a couple of members on here have wrote a few articles on how you might get out of smart pricing, but it never has worked for me yet. Use the search function and you might turn up a good read
forget the phrase "smart pricing". you must provide adwords advertisers with targeted traffic that will convert for them. if you provide bad traffic, adsense will lower your epc, because the advertisers on your site are not able to sell their products there. in other words, publishers who get the best epc usually provide the most targeted traffic.
You might want to check out my smart pricing faq: http://www.admoolah.com/blog/index.php/2006/12/smart-pricing-faq-for-adsense-publishers/
Write content that draws people who are in the market to buy things. These people actually buy stuff when they click an ad and go to the merchant's page. Think review pages, think product information pages, think how-to-build pages (that require people to buy materials). Also, never try to trick people into clicking ads.
It's very good article. Would you allow me copy paste your aritle for my forum http://www.adulu.com/showthread.php?t=448 thank you
Respect TOS, get natural traffic, do not click on your ads, do not ask people to click on your ads and you won't be smart priced.
Thanks everyone - all this has been really useful and has helped me clarify development plans. Any other advice will be greatly appreciated. So far I think I can summarise: Develop a site which attracts a definite demographic and provide them with content which is relevant and with reason to return. Smart pricing is not applied to these sites.
That's not quite true Aphinks. Of course all of those things are good things to do, but even if you do all those things you can still get smart priced. If the traffic you have is generally "browsers" instead of "buyers", you may be smart priced. The classic example is two different sites about digital cameras. If you have a site about photography tips, people are not really looking to buy cameras. They may be mildly interested in checking out new camera models, so they may click on ads, but they are really not ready to buy. However if you have a site about digital camera reviews, many of the people on the site will be actively looking to buy a camera. When they click an ad, there is a good chance they will be buying. The photography tip site may be smart priced because the traffic just doesn't convert as well as the review site.
i think you should forget the smart pricing, and always write some good content article, bring more triffic, your adense ads will always change, you will avoid the smart pricing.
Thanks tlainevool - I'm developing a site relevant and attractive to a significant professional sector within the ABC demographic. I suppose by its nature it will have inqusitive browsers and buyers so it would be on a 50/50 model of those you used as examples. Thanks Best Domain - I'm archiving all articles once they are replaced with new and hope to do so at least 6 times per year. Another section will be added to on at least a weekly basis. Does old content have negative effects for its adsense?
So it seems like it would be a good idea to "pre-sell" visitors on the ads that you can only assume are going to be displayed? So trying to avoid smart-pricing would lead to a lot of MFA type sites, correct? I'm not a fan of smart-pricing, but at least Google seems to re-evaluate sites on a regular basis.
I once had a discussion with Adsense support on Smart Pricing and that made clear a few things: Luckily the new site was not smart priced.
No I don't think so. The goal of an MFA site is to get as many visitors as possible and get them all to click the ads. This strategy does not target the right type of visitor, it depends on quantity not quality.
I personally don't think that sudden high traffic in itself would influence smart pricing (although only Google knows that for sure). More likely is that most sudden high trafiic sources (e.g. Digg) is poor quality traffic that doesn't convert well.