Hey all, I have weird things going on in my account nowadays. It looks like smart pricing, but it also does not look like smart pricing. Here is what is hapening: 1. My Site A is my highest traffic site. I've always worked on it since it had the best pay per click. It used to pay between $0.50 to $2.00 per click and NEVER below $0.20 per click (just never; I never got such clicks perhaps for 5 months.). Nowadays, this site mostly gets $0.005 or $0.002 per click. It is so ridiculous. 2. But 10% of my clicks from the same site are still between $0.80 to $1.30. So it doesnt look like a usual smart price case. 3. My Site B (which has very little traffic) has between 0.50 to 2.00 per click. In the past, it was just the opposite. This low traffic site never made me more than $0.30 per click, and that is why I never worked on it, and focused more on my other site. But unfortunately that other site does 2 c per click nowadays. So in all respects, this doesnt look like a smart pricing case. Because only my top site is affected, and my other site started to do even better, and because even in my top site, sometimes I do get high value clicks. SO there must be some concept like smart price, but not quite smart price from which sites get affected when they do certain things, or maybe when they start to get more traffic. (Almost ALL my traffic is from Google search by the way. My sites rank very well in Google.) Do you think, for instance, it might be related to bounce rate? Coz I recently started to care more about ads since I started to earn well than other things, which might have increased the bounce rate, which might, in turn be the reason for the fall in payment per click.
rcj662, that's actually quite possible! If they did such a thing, then the results wouldnt be surprising. But is it even possible to do such a thing, to smart price a keyword? If they did so, then it makes sense why I sometimes do get paid much higher and why my other related sites do get paid much higher.
mjewel, since the overall traffic increased, the traffic from outside the US also increased. However, the increase is proportional to the increase in US/Canada/UK traffic. So I don't think it is related to my outside the US traffic. Don't you think?
What do you mean ForgottenCreature? Do you mean "after I observed the drop"? If so, no, I haven't tried to change the ads or anything. But before that, I had tried to optimize in order to get the maximum CRT. And I had put one more ad on the home page. Do you think that could have decreased the site's value in the eyes of Google and thus caused a drop? I read your posts though I do not answer them, ForgottenCreature, and you do seem to be quite knowledgeable. Thanks for any suggestions.
Any other ideas??? I believe this might be the reason for recent low pay per click prices many publishers have reported.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=573856 That seems to be EXACTLY the same thing that is happening to me! Check out my thread
thewebhostingdir, I think you might be right in your first reply. It might be some kind of earning based smart pricing where better earning sites also get more crap ads than low earning ones or low traffic ones. As to your last post, no I dont think this is because of the clickable area change, because my CTR is the same. It is not CTR-related at all. Plus, this thing started a little before the clickable area thing was introduced (almost around the same time though). And yes, it is interesting how most publishers report similar things nowadays. itzCarlin, yes, I read your thread. You seem to be asking a simliar question from what I see from one of your replies to that thread. And yes, I am also wondering if there is a website-based smart pricing. But that also does not sem to be the case, because I do get 1 dollar plus clicks too on this website, too, but it is just that I have lots of 1 cent or 2 cent clicks nowadays which I never had in the past. So I am guessing it could be a keyword related smart pricing, too, or something along those lines...
Doubt it's any type of smartpricing...not according to the accepted smartpricing conditions/symptoms. Your whole account should be toast. Likely you've got some low paying MFAA ads showing up on your site that need to be filtered.