How I Combat (and Beat) Adsense Smartpricing

Okay, so we all know what smartpricing is, but there are a lot of speculation about how to undo/defeat it. After about two months, I think I know how, and I've done it to my own sites.

First, a background. Of all my sites, Site A was making the most, generating the most clicks, getting the most traffic, etc. Basically, Site A is my main site. Adsense did extremely well (4 figure clicks a day), but eventually I was smartpriced, and the CPC went as low as $.05-cents on average. And as we all know, smartpricing affects the whole account.

So I removed Adsense from Site A, and swapped it with YPN. All the usual problems -- poorly targeted ads, duplicate ads, etc. But the high CPC helped to combat the low CTR, so in general, I was making about the same or slightly more with YPN on Site A than with Adsense. Usually more.

As a result of removing Adsense from Site A, the rest of my sites running Adsense showed improved CPC. I have been getting a stable $.10-cents CPC on average for the last month and change, which is double what I was getting before with Adsense on Site A.

Now, was it worth it? I say Yes, because YPN's average on Site A remains strong, and the improved performances of all my other sites running Adsense have combined for improved earnings on par with with my pre-smartprice days.

What happened when I removed Adsense from Site A? I believe I removed smartpricing from my account (after about a month's time) and this had an impact on the rest of my sites.

 

interesting, but it's not really a way to "beat" smartpricing on the "low quality" site. though I guess that's asking for too much.

in my experience it hasn't really affected my whole account, though? when "site a" has huge traffic and low quality the EPC is horrible, but "site b" consistantly has a much higher EPC, and never seemed to drop from smartpricing

 

cool good to know. now i just need to get into yahoo's program

 

Unfortunately, YPN isn't available for everybody

 

removing Adsense and replace it with YPN maybe a solution for only people having both not for all specially when the site A has the biggest income source and removing adsense will kill the whole revnue.

 

YPN didn't work for me. I see four figure earnings every month with Adsense. When I removed Adsense and applied YPN to my pages my earnings plummeted. I don't know why. Maybe not enough ads to serve my niche (entertainment).

 

yeah.......... what if site A is the only site and yahoo didn't accept you for site A?

I do have a site B but it's a shopping cart.

 

Since I have removed Adsense ads from many webpages of my portal website featuring A to Z subject matters my Adsense earnings are improving.

 

you can also alternate adsense w yahoo ads. put adsense when you feel your cpc is at the highest rate. and change them with ypn when smartpricing hit you and so on..

 

thats the reason why I prefer having multiple small sites with little traffic but high CTR

 

Thanks Jack,

How did you know site A was the one to remove the ads from?

If smartpricing affects the whole account, surely the low CPC on site A could have been from poorly converting ads on site B, C or D?

I don't have YPN as an option, so would prefer to get it right!

Cheers

 

This illustrates that since smartpricing effects the whole account, and not just a low converting site or channel, it is not, in fact, smart at all.

I would also guess that since so few small AdWords advertisers really use accurate tracking data, the amount of accurate data on ad-to-sale conversions that forms the basis for smart pricing is way too low to be valid as well.

 

I know Site A was the culprit because Site A is my highest money earner -- so the percentages of clicks that didn't convert would be most noticable coming from this site. With Site A removed from the account, the numbers would go down immeasurably.

 

So of all my channels, which ones should I be removing? Ones with CTR less than 0.1% or ones with a low eCPM? I don't mind taking out the channels than don't earn me much, but I'm not comfortable losing my biggest earners.

Cryo.

 

From my experience, I would say that if you had left AdSense ads on site A smartpricing would be gone the same way after a month or so, meaning that the solution was not removing the ads but, most likely, simply waiting.

 

OK, great stuff that Jack has put his research findings into the public domain, to which I am of course eternally grateful. I have also one site that performs quite well (for my liking anyway) and several sites that convert like the Pope. Sadly I do not live across the pond and hence I cannot introduce YPN ads onto my poorly converting sites to verify Jack's findings for myself. So I ask can anyone recommend another ad publishing network that may provide ads contextually for my pages? Does AdBrite convert well for others?

One example of a poorly converting site is a site I have that hosts quiz questions, for pub quizzes for example. Due to the fact that the questions are so varied the keywords that generate the ads are so bizzare that i find myself repeating the word quiz and quizzes etc all over my pages in order to focus the contextual robots. If I replace AdSense by another ad publishing network, then what are my chances of having the same problems? Perhaps I should look away from the contextual completely and focus on affiliate schemes.

 

same case with me jack
but i just change the ads with my brother (family) account
same, still use adsense

and smartpricing gone from my account
maybe my brother got it now
but, better than nothing......

 

Sounds like your problem would be solved if you made each question a page to itself. What you describe doesn't sound like smart pricing, but like poor targeting. So you could also pick the post where you think the best keywords are, and use the targeting codes to emphasize that part of the page to google, and de-emphasize the rest of the page.