Adsense important Info

That makes sense. I personally feel advertisers should be provided with high qualaity placements. BTW, I am an advertiser so...

 

Darren Rowse, a member here, has blogged on ProBlogger about this issue. Quote:

* Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.
* One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one.
* Smart pricing is evaluated each week. So removing ads from sites you suspect are converting poorly could result in seeing an adjustment to a higher smart pricing percent in as little as a week.
* Smart pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so you could be rewarded for new conversions that saw the initial click from your site up to 29 days earlier.

Read more:
Publisher Uses Multiple AdSense Accounts to Increase Earnings

 

How google can track conversions? Unless my signup form or checkout script communicates with google or somehow google knows the checkout URL for my site, other than that I don't see how can Google track conversions.

Also, there are some adwords ads that are not aimed at ONLINE conversion, like something that must be purchased through the telephone, how can Google track that people who clicked on the ads picked the phone and called the advertisers?

I think the smart pricing thing is just another rumour

 

How is "poorly converting site" defined ? What ctr will be considered poor ?

 

thats the point that theres no way to get this info. as far as i understand the poor/good conversion ratio is determined by how happy the advertisers are, ie. how many sales they make or whatever else they are offering.

 

You can go with < 1%

 

I was assuming <.5%.

tomm: A conversion for our purposes is when an impression becomes a click. As publishers, that's all we know. Now Advertisers can specify an action to be considered a conversion, but that's between them and Google.

 

Mister Tut,

From the link to jensense posted:
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html

says that poorly converting site is if the clicks doesn't result in online sales, registrtions, or phone calls

 

Yep. But we as publishers don't have access to that info.
The best we can do is to work on our CTR. Although using spammy techniques to boost CTR will probably hurt conversions.

 

Well Google have actually stated that a low CTR ad unit could even be the best converting ad unit (for the advertiser). So according to that, I doubt if CTR should really be taken as the end-all and be-all.

 

I think there is value in looking at our ad units and trying to determine why they have the CTR they have.

Is a certain unit getting a high CTR merely because it is just under site nav or next to the scroll bar (Oops clicks)? If so, I'll bet it converts poorly for the advertiser.

 

Now that makes much more sense than just looking at the plain CTR to determine if you should keep or can the ads.

 

So i just made this post, right now, about Adsense Referrals.

You people just read trough it, from bottom to end

I myself laughed while writing.

 

Well, just to put things straight. I didn't receive an e-mail, my blog post was after reading Adsense Advisor's post.

 

Crusader, yes, it makes more sense, but on the other hand is much harder to quantify.

 

That's true. At least it will give newly referred publishers a bit more time to reach that $100 mark, and ensuring that the referring publisher gets paid for the referral.

However I still think 180 days is a bit short. I think most newbie webmasters will take up to a year to achieve it. But 180 is better than 90 days!

 

I just wanted to make a note that I actually wrote all those points (not Darren) in my original post on smart pricing. He had quoted that from JenSense in his first entry on smart pricing, but guess he forgot to cite it as mine in his most recent entry on smart pricing.

Smart pricing is one of those things where you can do testing but it is really difficult to track what is influencing the smart pricing. What I have been advising people about determining what site could possibly be bringing the smart pricing down on an account is the source of traffic. Quality traffic is much more likely to convert than bad quality traffic for the advertiser.

However, your best earning site could be the site responsible for your account being smart priced to a greater extent, so you could lose revenue by pulling AdSense from that account. So it is worth taking that into consideration when wanting to test the smart pricing.

And lastly, consider the content on the page (both actual content and placement of content) versus the content ads you are trying to make appear. If you are manipulating the content to make the ads extremely prominent through tactics AdSense would likely deem shady (ie. no content above the fold except the ads; using shady tactics to make ads for 'high payig keyword' appear even if the content is about 'low paying keyword') chances are good that even if the visitor clicks on one, it is much less likely to convert for the advertiser, thus causing smart pricing to impact your account greater.

 

Hi Jenstar, that's very interesting - and your blog is excellent.

I wonder, in your travels, have you had any independent verification of what the Adsense team member disclosed re smart pricing or does everything hinge on that single source of information?

 

AdSense did comment on the issue here. And what I wrote wasn't based on a single source of information, although it was what prompted me to write about it at that time. Plenty of tidbits had been released here and there regarding smart pricing. I just pulled them all together, and inadvertantly started a firestorm about smart pricing because no one had gathered all the tidbits together.

 

Jen, it is entirely possible that the lapse was mine, not Darren's. Apologies.