Beating Smart Pricing?

If you haven't read the recent article at jensense about how smart pricing works, here it is:

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

Now, assuming that's correct, isn't there a way to beat smart pricing?

Let's say you have a site that you show Adsense/YPN ads on and you advertise it on Adwords. The goal is to pay low CPC in Adwords by finding niche keywords and getting high CPC through Adsense/YPN. Nothing groundbreaking yet...

BUT, now let's say you sign up for conversion tracking on your site and have a conversion defined as something that would almost never happen. Maybe signing up for a newsletter and the sign up box is at the bottom of the page or something.

Now, all the sites that show your ad are going to get penalized because the click from their site didn't convert! Best of all, these other sites ARE YOUR COMPETITORS so that's even more reason to do it!

Thoughts/ideas?!?!!

 

But what good would this do? You'd decrease the earnings of those sites, perhaps -- and it's not a given to me that this would actually work -- but how does that help your earnings? Rather than spending your money on beating down competitor's earnings, shouldn't you be spending it on increasing your own through better rankings, better content, etc.?

 

Smart pricing would be an issue if people actually clicked my adsense ads in the first place...

 

It helps your earnings because you are paying less CPC because those sites aren't "converting." However, you're still getting the same traffic and same revenue from Adsense.

It's not a given to me that it would work either, but if you believe the linked article it sure looks like it would.

 

Let me follow up and say that I'm not doing this (I don't even use conversions), but I just thought it was an interesting loophole.

 

I can see where you are coming from.
Increase your earnings by decreasing your outgoings.
I think it's probably less hassel to just drive more traffic to the site.

 

post your url here and I can guarantee 1000 clicks in 10 minutes

 

No this wouldn't work. Google would see that none of the clicks you get are converting, they would not apply smart pricing to any of the clicks. To apply smart pricing some clicks would need to be converting well, and others would need to be converting poorly.

 

When you say 'converting' what do you all mean ?

When a visitor clicks on an adsense ad, they go to someones website everytime. On that site there may be free literature to get such as from a gov or charity site, the site owner may make nothing from the websites sales or other merchandise, in fact the site could be a monetary loss, only kept running by grants etc.

On another site that the AdSense has taken someone to, they may sell a product, say for example 'Furniture'. An AdSense visitor may decide to buy the furniture, and do so by sending a check or money order from just reading the text address and other info on the website, with no sales info being collected from the website.

In either case Google has no record or ability to know if a sale was made due to any AdSense Ads - -

What the heck converts in sales etc.... That makes 'smart pricing' kick in due to this ?

 

Different advertisers have different types of conversion, some examples are:
Buying something
Subscribing to something
Signing up for something
etc.

 

heheheh... and that will be of something fraudalent

 

And in a lot of the sites Google has NO way of knowing if the visitor signed up for something or bought something from the site.......

Conversion is meaningless as far as adsense ad values

 

I'm just playing devil's advocate, but let's say you did get some of them to convert. Google sees the conversion even if it doesn't come from an ad. If you use Adwords, read more about the conversion tracker. It's just an image that gets shown on your "Order Confirmed" or whatever page.

 

I think if you are dealing with a large enough dataset, it will be clear over time if your sites are converting. Also, not that is says smart pricing affects an entire account, so I think the best way to fix things is to look for domains or pages that are low in quality of traffic, and consider moving them over to another ad network such as YPN for 30-60 days and see if it helps you on Google.

 

I think this is excellent advice. This just gave me a reason to try YPN!

 

The way to beat smart pricing is to develop a good, big site with lots of visitors from SE's .. Good visitors will buy and hence you wont be smart priceed