How do you know that you have been smart priced?

Is there any way that you can know for sure that you have been smart priced? Other then the drop of Adsence earning.

 

In my opinion there is no other way to know except your earning (per click rate) will go down .

 

There's no way of knowing that for sure

 

Hello,

Really there is not way, but for example if you have got click for $1.85 and then you start to earn .10 by click in a complete week, maybe you have got smart prices....

My 2 cents,
Jakomo

 

It all comes down to earnings. That's the only way you can tell. Keep track of your daily ePC and look at trends. Not today compared to yesterday, but rather a 7- or 14-day moving average. If the moving average takes a drastic drop, you MAY have been smartpriced. On the other hand, it may just be that a high-paying advertisers has quit buying ads for a while, too.

 

i think you are not allowed to know it.

 

Smartpriced is when you start getting significantly lower cpc than normal for alenth of time.

 

So I gotta wonder - if we don't really know when we are smart priced... how do we know it exists? Is it documented by Google anywhere that this happens? Or is this jsut something people came up with to explain sudden and lengthy drops in adsense revenue?

Forgive me if there's an obvious answer somewhere - I just haven't come across it. I've only heard of this on this forum.

 

You are right. Is there even an official definition of what "smart priced" means? If you know it, please share.

 

This is the best source and closest to official that I know of:

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html

 

Thanks for the link. From what I read I guess it's pretty difficult to tell if you have been smart priced or not. Even if you think you have been, there is no way to know for sure.

 

Ah well that makes some sense... however, I still wonder why google would really care? Google is in it to make money so why would they voluntarily cheapen your ads for you based on the content of a site? That's the part that makes no sense to me... it's not in Google's best interest to 'Smart Price'. It is in Google's interest to spend the money that an advertiser bids on a keyword regardless of the conversion potential of the site. Google only garuntees clicks (thus using up your budget) not conversions.

Am I wrong in this thinking or have I gone retarded here?

 

I wouldn't say you've gone retarded One thing to think about, though, is that maybe they are looking at long-term gain vs the quick buck. Long-term gains come from satisfied advertisers who will stay in the program. If the advertisers start paying big costs for clicks that don't produce results, they will start to flee the program and then where is Google?

 

it's not based on the content of a site, it's based on conversions for the advertisers.

so quality of traffic to the site is what determines your conversion ratio.

for instance, if you had the best content site in the world, but you paid people to go there and click on your adsense ads, your epc would end up being very low... because there wouldn't be very many conversions for the advertisers.

 

Right I can understand that - they want their advertisers to be happy and get conversions. I was thinking that conversely they would want those displaying the ads to be happy as well but I guess they lose nothing if we all disappered because they still run the largest displayer of google ads ever... google. So I've come around to understanding that this more.

There is one thing - I run a $160 dollar a day adwords campaign for my day job and Google certainly seems to make no effort in cheapening those bids! Well at least in no trackable way... in most cases they spend a tad over my daily budget! Smart Price those ads Google! Save a brother some cents! haha

 

They are not as concerned about the publishers because they are not "kicking anything in" And if publishers drop out, they figure "so what", just take a look around the forums to see how many people are wanting to get in.

 

But it IS based on content as outlined in the article above - because it's your content that brings in the crappy customers. See the article's expample of Digital Camera sites.

Another thing that gets me is this: What about a site that doesn't track conversions or simply relies on traffic for income... i.e. most blogs. I'm sure there are blogs that use Adwords to pull in traffic - how would google price to satisfy that customer if they can't see conversions? What would be a crappy customer to that blog? It would be someone that didn't click the blogs ads most likely ... and then my brain starts to hurt because that blog could in theory be smart priced due to it's own lack of conversion tracking and reliance on ad clicking for income!

 

Yeah I can see that - I mean it's almost animal like how crazy people seem to get here about making a $1 a day through adsense.

 

Nope. The only way of knowing is when your adsense earnings drop to 10 cents a click or less.

 

And even that is not definite proof. I had that happen a few times and, upon examining the ads on my site, saw that I was being taken over by Arbitrageurs who were putting up penny ads. I removed those sites with my filter and my earnings shot back up. Had I been smart-priced? No, just fallen victim to MFAA ads.