Hi, I've just tried different niches and for some high paying niches I've got 1$-1,5$ clicks at first. Now those clicks has gone down to 0,2$. Is it normal to have high earnings at first then decreasing or didn't adsense like my pages??
Well google sees what your users do and the bases your payouts off of that. So if people clicked you ads but didn't convert well then you're smart priced. You will stay right around the 20 cents and it will slowly start to drop.
I don't really get this. What does it mean "it didn't convert well" ? The majority of clicks usually doesn't convert ! Am i right ? Personally when i click, i do it to be informed or out of curiocity.
Well if clicks don't convert it means like say your topic is web hosting and someone clicks on a web hosting ad. If that user doesn't purchase a server or something you get penalized for this. Yes a majority of the clicks don't convert which is what smart pricing isn't fair to the publisher.
Yes you do google the term smart pricing and read some articles on it. Honest publishers are being penalized for actions they can't even control.
I guess smart pricing was for sites with irrelavant content but targetted keywords. My pages are informative pages. Sometimes it's hard to understand google.
I think "smart pricing" is something else. For example: if i click to a CAR ad, i must BUY the car if i click ? Doesn't seem reasonable to me....
Exactly it isn't reasonable to the publisher. That's why everyone is upset about it. If you click on car you may not have to buy a car but maybe signup for the site would be considered a conversion. Not everyone has to do this though don't think all your traffic has to convert even google knows that's not possible. If enough of your traffic doesn't convert though you will start to see your adsense revenue drop huge. A lot of people on this forum, myself included are getting an average of 1 cent per click due to smart pricing.
well I get thousands of clicks but it still sucks. I've removed adsense from my sites now though and I'm trying out a new network.
Could I ask if this smart pricing issue is global for one Google Adsense account or it depends on the "actual" Google Ad placements, or is it connected with websites?
Wow, thanks for the helpful info, brd. I started adsense last year after smart pricing had already kicked in, so I don't have anything to compare it to. But I've seen graphs of other peoples' earnings, and there is always a very noticeable drop (and subsequent decay) in revenue at the point where Google introduced smart pricing. Ok, my question is this... who pockets the difference? Advertisiers are still getting charged high rates. Publisher payouts are dramatically lower. This means the middleman (google) gets all that money? Sickening. I guess this is what happens when monopolies take over. I wish Yahoo would get it's arse in gear and release a good product. Maybe if Microsoft buys them out, it'll lead to changes. Down with freakin monopolies already. Didn't we learn anything from the 20th century? This has been my unsolicited socio-political rant for the year. Carry on.
It's global for your whole adsense account. If you have an arcade site which doesn't convert and you have a medical sites that converts your medical site will still be smart priced based on the arcade site. Ad placement does have a little to do with it though. If a user is tricked into clicking on the ads then they are less likely to convert. However if a user clicks on the ads because they are interested and not tricked they are more likely to convert. All in all though you have no real control over it.
Yeah my revenue has dropped over 70% with google in the past couple months. Who is pocketing the difference you ask? Well supposedly the advertisers are getting that money back. I have quite a few sites which I advertise using google adwords and they hardly convert at all. No signups or anything and I've never seen 1 cent returned to me. I guess you have to be a very large advertiser or something. I really think google is pocketing the extras but there is no way to prove it. As for the monopoly we can all only hope that microsoft buys out google and then fixes ypn. When ypn was doing good a few years back a lot of publishers left adsense and went to ypn because of the higher revenue. If this happens again google will have to raise their payouts in order to keep publishers. Right now though they can get away with paying 1-2 cent clicks.
I'm not think that I'm smart priced, but it is interesting topic for me as I've heard of it this week first time. And if someone is smart priced, is it there a way back, to be not smart priced?
Doesn't this also have to do with the time a person spends on the advertisers site. many people might click on a ad but only stay on that site for a few seconds. If this happens regularly then I think the prices might drop. On my sites earning vary but averege earnings never venture to far away from $0.04 per click. I don't think conversion rate or smart pricing has anything to do with this. Google knows that big advertisers want cheap traffic and they also know that small publishers don't really have any alternative when it comes to affiliate programs. They use our small sites to dump cheap ads that won't be accepted by other big publishers. If you look at my site and despite it being quite diverse you will notice that most of my ads are either from ringtone sites or socialnetworking sites.
Well you could be smart priced and not even know it. If you're making 1.00$ per click the advertiser could be paying 3.00$ a click and you're only see a piece of that due to smart pricing. It's easier to see on sites that are only making 1 cent per click but that doesn't mean that you're not smart priced. Every week google re evaluates accounts and sees if they should keep them smart priced or take them out of smart pricing. So if you removed your ads for a week and then put them back up you, in theory would no longer be smart priced. A week later though when google checks again you will more then likely go back to being smart priced.
Yes time spent on a site is also taken into consideration. Also the number of pages the clicker views. This does hold some weight but no one is sure how much weight it holds. From everything I read a majority of the weight is held by signups and purchases. I'm sure there are even more things which influence smart pricing that we don't know about.