Has anyone ever written to the Adsense team believing that they were being smart priced and to request a reconsideration?
no need of a reconsideration - it is just like the quality score in adwords.When you adjust the ad settings,or remove ads from non-converting sites,the CPC will Automatically increase.There is no way for you to ask for reconsideration and then remove the smart pricing.But one thing you can do is make ads convert - this is the most important thing.Do on page optimization and make sure that the ads are relevant to the page title.
This is good information. When you say make the ads convert, I assume you mean achieve the highest CTR possible? Would that be correct.
Been smart priced can really hurt if you are using Adsense arbitrage. But otherwise it really doesn't matter does it? I know the cost-per-click per ad is going to be less but this can be balanced out by higher CTR, higher traffic levels and ad adjustment. If you are smart-priced there's nothing much you can do about it. I guess you can write to Google requesting a reconsideration but i've never heard about them back-tracking.
Conversion is much more than getting High CTR.As You know many advertisers might be selling products and so they would want the visitor from your blog to buy actually rather than just visit the site and then bounce from there in a second.But i agree that all advertisers are not looking for a sale.Getting a high CTR is ok but conversion means visitor should do what the advertiser wants him to do. So first aim for HIGH ctr [try to get the max out of whatever you have]and the conversion depends on the niche and ads effectiveness,so those things are not in your hands.That would depend on the source of traffic and also the niche. Moreover this is why i love micro niche and niche sites - i always try to create blogs in niches wherein advertisers are selling things and so most ads convert.The cpc has always been high.The situation might be different for a tech blog]