Oh yeah... same thing BIG time. I recently bought a number of proxies based on 3X monthly earnings at the time and now they make just about squat. Plus the CTR has dropped big-time as well. It's impacted a legit site of mine that was getting about $0.20 CPC and is now down around $0.06 CPC. I'm pulling adsense from EVERYTHING for a while to hopefully "reboot" smartpricing and then I think I'll just add it back to my legit site. I think it REALLY sucks that Google smartprices by ACCOUNT instead of by SITE. Vic
ouch that must suck on a lighter note: smartpricing was going on in my account bout 2 weeks ago. i got $0.14 from 4 cliks. magically smartpricing vanished and today from 12 clicks im just over $2. the only changes i made were ad placement. i'm not sure how you 'get rid' of smartpricing, but im glad its gone also yes i agree its annoying that it smartprices by account rather than site. imo its just plain illogical.
Ok now say, somebody has a very good site, with really good content and visitors love it. And most visitors come from organic rankings. Now, say a visitor clicks on an ad, and lands up at a page that is not worth a squat and is poorly optimized as a landing page, so the visitor does not convert and backtracks out of the advertiser's site. In such a case, the publisher will get smartpriced although it wasn't their fault that the advertisers landing page was like a three year old's first crayon drawing.