..Being riped off. so from now on..when google has "smart priced" you. please refer to "google just riped me off" -Tim
Basically, when google lowers your earnings because none of your clicks convert to clients. I haven't heard of anyone getting smartpriced up though :/.
yeah its a pretty dodgy practice. I bet they dont `smartprice' the cost of the clicks that publishers pay When I was using adsense it was pretty rare to see reasonable terms going for anything less that 50 cents yet i'm constantly getting only 5 and 10 cent clicks from google. Good luck trying to bid 5 cents for a click on google. Seems to me that they are ripping both us and the advertisers off.
I honestly think it happened to me. I used to be getting .1-.2 dollars a click. Averaged about $40-50 a day. Now I get .02-.039 dollars per click. Literally in the last 7 days my average is .039 dollars per click.
It's happening to me too. The thing is, if for example I take my car to the garage with a minor problem and the garage rips me off I go elsewhere next time. If you think you're getting ripped off you should do the same. Or stop crying about it.
indeed smartpricing is not a way for google to rip you off, it's a way for google to make sure you don't rip off the advertisers. because if they are ripped off, they'll f0ck off to a different program, and it ain't what google wants. so next time, don't say, i've been smartpriced, nor, i've been ripped off, say, i've been prevented from ripping off advertisers.
Oh, never thought smartpricing was real, I've been hearing about it a lot on other forums. Care to explain more about it? Like why 'G' smart prices you?
I dont like smartpricing as a publisher - but can see why it is used by google in an effort to appease advertisers so they increase their overall spend as the ROI increases or holds firm as their spend increases. In effect increasing googles turnover and profits. Now put yourself in the position of an advertiser and you see that a high paying click is not converting at all from some sources. Would you continue to spend more money? or would you pull the advert even though from 'all' sources it is showing a positive ROI? or would you prefer that smartpricing kicked in a minimised any revenue spend on non-converting sources? Simple answer is smartpricing concept - as it still ensures greater exposure of your site but at a much reduced cost... and who knows, it could pay off in the long term if the site has been bookmarked and the buyer returns after the google cookie has expired that is reponsible for tracking smartpricing. Basically, you win some you lose some but at the end of the day you are still gaining a 'small' income as a publisher (which would hopefully cover your webhosting costs and in effect providing you with free hosting with the 'chance' to make some money now and again - when your visitors convert for your advertisers). You can also think of it in terms of affiliate programmes - normally you only make money when a visitor converts and nothing when they fail to convert. SO in this instance, smartpricing can be viewed in the form of a 'token' payment to the publishers for sending traffic, however, that traffic wasn't qualified (or converting). Affiliate programmes may pay higher rates when visitors convert, but they generally pay nothing when failing to convert. So adsense smartpricing is a bridge between the normal PPC conversion rate and receiving nothing. (It is barely a token gesture, but as I said, you can't win them all and have 100% of visitors converting all the time).
How much time does it take for a website to be smart priced? "google just riped me off" sounds fair enough
Excellent comment. Will have to give some green for this. Instead of complaining, why not think about your sources of traffic. If you have highly targeted traffic, it should convert fairly well and you shouldn't have a problem with being smartpriced. Instead of sending out myspace bulletins and stumbling your pages you should work on the quality of your traffic. Anyways patataur is right on with his comment.
First of all low conversions most of the times is due to bad ad copy (targeting clicks and not conversions) from the advertiser and targeting the wrong keywords, not the publishers fault. Smartpricing the way it works now is unfair to the publisher, most webmasters have more than one website and the clicks on some of them will convert better than on the others which is natural (depending on the type of traffic each site is getting and the niche). However, google doesn't smart price the low converting sites but the entire account. Even worst just one low performing site can smartprice an entire account (link) So let's say I have ten sites and the clicks on adsense on 9 of them have high conversion rates but on one the conversion rates are low, my account can then be smartpriced and I will be sending high quality leads to advertisers (from the majority of mysites) and advertisers will be paying peanuts for them.
unfair indeed, publisher delivers his part of the deal, the problem is too many merchants complain(ice.com for example) that leads do not convert into sales, so Google to keep the merchants happy had to refund some money back and the way they do it is "smart pricing" ...
I think google now smartprice according to sites within a publishers account. Today I received a click for $1.71 on one site which was previously receiving low payment due to smartpricing while on another site I received a few $0.03 and below clicks - could have been low paying ads or smartpriced. However, the 2nd site was receiving better cost per click last week. So I feel that google may have switched to smartpricing individual sites (when they introduced the ability to sign advertisers up to channels... it seems logical enough and it could even be reduced to smartpricing for Channels that perform poorly instead of just sites). I agree though, a lot of smartpricing is also the result of advertisers with bad ad copy and poor keyword research. Although smartpricing will help those advertisers not lose as much cash and make them become more efficient and therefore eventually enable them to produce much better targeted ad copy and keywords. All this hopefully leading to less smartpricing for publishers as ROI for advertisers increases due to better converting visitors on the content network. In this utopian view it is a win:win:win situation for google, the advertisers and the publishers.
Argghhh, I completely forgot about this when I put all the blame on the publisher. Of course you are right. Funny thing: I have two main sites. One converts better then the other. They get an equal amount of traffic and a decent amount of clicks. Now when I put Adsense on both sites I make less in Adsense then when I put it only on one site. Yeah, I think smartpricing is o.k. but it should be done on a per site basis.
It's not the publishers fault. If anything tell the publisher your doing it, and give them the chance to opt out of that campaign. Also limit it to certain channels or websites.