My revenues have dropped considerable in the last few weeks and I believe it is from smart pricing. Has anyone here been affected by smartpricing and if so, how did you bring your profits back to normal?
Everyone is affected by smart pricing nowadays. And it has only one solution that you increase your page impressions.
True thing , me too ..i run adsense on about 110 sites ..and the revenuews dropped almost half. One thing i noticed was that my mediawiki sites are faring better than the blogs. Any thoughts ?
When you're earning less, don't immediately blame smart pricing. They're three main things in the earning equation: Pageviews, CTR and PPC. If any of the three decreases, you'll see lower earnings. What you need to do is spot if PPC is going down or not. If it is, you may have been smart-priced or simply advertisers currently paying less. If PPC stays on the same course then the problem is with the content or traffic. If you can use Excel then it should be easy to spot the trend of pageviews, CTR and PPC. Download the csv file of your adsense report and plot some charts with 7-day moving average. But remember to compute PPC column (PPC = Earning / Clicks). Btw, chart below shows that i've been smart-priced since 11/24/2006.
PPC definitely going down for mysites and hence i think i'm been smart priced. So how to avoid it? Too bad, you can't avoid it. You can bring your revenue up by bringing more visitors and increase your overal clicking on the ads. That will help
Thanks for the insight brandnewx. I think that you are right in that you need to truly identify the problem first. Are you doing anything to fix it? I've read in a couple places that it helps to actually remove ads from your site. ie. if you have pages with 3 ad units, remove one. Does anyone think that this is a valid strategy? That adsblacklist.com is interesting. ClearICe, are you using this site and has it helped?
is there any way to get out of the smart pricing effect my revenue has dropped by 4-5 times please help me.
how do google guys know wheather visitors in my site end up buying something from other website they land by clicking an ad
My PPC has gone down, so I know I've been smart priced. I don't mind, though - smart pricing seems fair to me. I just wish more of my visitors would convert. vic_msn: Google probably gives Adwords clients code to put on the appropriate conversion pages. When this javascript is loaded, Google knows that the visitors converted.
agreed. as publishers we fail to realize that billionaire google isn't the one paying us, these advertisers are. and it's only fair that they make sales off our leads.
I got smart priced a few months ago - I can tell for certain because I share revenue on some sites, showing my publisher id half the time and a friends the other half. He's been getting much better PPC than me - approx double. Anyway, this month my PPC has gone back up to match his. I don't think it's anything I've done to my site - most likely someone has created an Adwords campaign which works for my sites. I'm afraid you just have to put up with it.
I am also a adwords advertiser but I haven't seen any such javascripts offered by Google to track adsense and adwords. the use analytics and adwords together but not many affiliate users would do that