Don't get traffic from social media sites. Remove the adsense from any site that has a CTR (click rate) rate less than 3%. For your adsense niche you want search engine traffic only. Digg folks and Stumbleon and so on very rarely click ads and all that worthless traffic will push your CTR down.
Not great advice. I make $800 a month off a site that has a CTR under 2%, so what sense would it make to remove my adsense from this site? If this were the case all forum sites should just remove their adsense when some are making a lot of money even though their CTR is low
It would appear you didn't read or understand the question. The question was how to avoid being smart priced. A CTR of under 3% will get you smart priced. Period.
Sorry, show me the Google rule that states under 3% CTR you are smart priced? You are just guessing my friend, period. My clicks bring in an average of 10 to 15 cents each, and I know from the market I am in this very normal. You assume Google treats all sites the same, and there is this magic 3% line if you cross you are smart priced. If only it were that simple
This really does work. I had a site making around 5$ a day. I updated the layout/content and the earnings jumped to 10-20$ a day Also, filter out low quality traffic - from social media sites and some countries.
Smartpricing is to do with poor conversion not low CTR, so removing ads from a low CTR site will not work. It is more probable (but not always) that a very high CTR site will have poor conversion, if people are being misled into clicking, and this will result in smartpricing. http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/facts-about-smart-pricing.html
Not even. A CTR of 0.5% that results in 100% conversion for the advertiser is good. A CTR on YOUR site of 85% that results in 1% conversion for the advertiser is going to cause you problems.
To Rasputin and Adpubster, have you ever ran an Adwords campaign? If yes, do you report your ROI? It would be pretty easy to determine ROI if you were selling products. And assuming Google comes back and says, hey what was your ROI last month. I haven't run an adwords campaign so thats why I'm asking. The post Rasputin posted from the adsense blog didn't even address earnings per click, which is what we are paid! I got to wonder do you guys even make money with adsense. This is the facts guys, when your CTR drops, the big Gizoogle, serves up the cheaper ads for that keyword you are working. The less the advertiser pays for the ads the less google pays you for the click. By the way, I speak from personal experience, I have seen my EPC, jump from 10 to 15 cents a click to now I average no less than $1.30 a click. I have even gotten some $8.00 clicks for my favorite niche. Now to whoever reads this, my advice would be to experiment. And don't ad adsense until you get good search engine traffic for keywords you are targeting. I am done on this subject because I know what works and don't have time to debate with people who are clueless.
So if we have a differing experience that disputes your claim then we are all just "clueless"? I make $800 a month off one site and $300 a month of a second site (both with a CTR under 2%). Is 10 to 15 cents a click in a fairly low paying niche being smart priced? I don't think so, but then again I am clueless.
CTR 3 percent is crazy. I would only be worried if you have less than 0.50 CTR. Around 1 percent is perfectly normal.
Google specifically said that CTR wasn't taken into equation with regards to smart pricing, only the behavior of the traffic you send compared to the other sites and the topic of your site. Money is money, whether you get 100$ from a site with 1% CTR or 100$ from a site with 10% CTR, the result is the same.
Smartpricing is all about poor conversion for the advertiser, so my best advice would be to make sure your visitors know that the ads are ads. Blending with your design is fine, just don't overdo it.
You and fillipina are comparing apples to oranges. Nobody said you couldn't make $1,000,000 a month and still be smart priced. But if you weren't smartpriced, you could be making $10,000,000 as opposed to that $1,000,000. And to the people who keep talking about the advertisers conversions, no one has yet to answer how google measures an advertisers conversion rate, or ROI. Since it would appear I am the only who doesn't know what he is talking about, please enlighten me.