how to avoid smart pricing?

We don't know. That said, it seems pretty logical to me. If your site converts poorly compared to other sites who send traffic to an advertiser, your traffic is of low quality and you get smart priced. How and when this happens - who knows - but if I was running an ad campaign and this one site sent visitors who never bought or signed up for anything I'd want to stop showing my ads on that site - alternatively smartprice it. You're right, we don't know for sure, but that's how I choose to look at it. In the long run tricking people is unsustainable for all parties, just as click fraud damages advertisers and publishers. Lots of people click ads, never buy anything, advertisers lose money, stop advertising, publishers lose their business.

 

Let me clear something up. The reason why I said to dump a site with a low CTR is because since I have 16 sites, I assumed others have many sites as well. If you have one site, then of course it wouldn't make sense to drop your adsense. I apologize if that mistake on my part caused any confusion.

On the other hand, if one site has that super low CTR, your whole account will be smart priced, not just that one site. That is why I said to dump the adsense. Again, if you have one site and you're smart priced, then keep your adsense, and leave the social bookmarking alone. That will kill your CTR quicker than anything. That and having your adsense attached to your profile here on Digital Point.

Now to reiterate, the main best way to avoid being smart priced if you have only site is to make sure your traffic comes mainly from the search engines, and that your site is very keyword focused. Hope that clears everything up. But all that talk about an advertisers ROI, and conversion rates is pure B.S. and has nothing to do with your earnings per click.

 

get new traffic imo

 

Just where are you getting this misinformation? CTR is irrelevant, and that is directly according to google. It's conversion on the advertiser's site, NOT YOURS that counts.

 

who do you think is paying for those ads? it's certainly not google!

why would an advertiser want to pay for clicks that don't convert into sales?

 

Yes, smart-pricing is indeed confusing, but does in some way deal with low conversion rate....

 

How much did you guy consider a smart price?
To me 0.1-0.2 per click is high

Can anyone tell me whether traffic from social networks are good or not?

 

Google: Social networking pays poor advertising dividends

 

You need targeted traffic to avoid smart pricing. Check out this link:

http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-increase-your-adsense-ctr.html

 

Ok, noob, so tell me how google measures conversion rates?

 

Whats your point? Advertisers pay for advertising that doesn't convert all the time. When they stop paying for it, someone else fills their place.

 

To implement conversion tracking, Google gives adword advertiser a JavaScript snippet to paste on the pages they wish to track.

Google page about conversion tracking:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=61

 

So that would imply only people who are selling things from their websites are using adwords. What about lawyers, plumbers, dentists, universities, etc, etc, etc, how do they track conversions?

 

Why would it imply a sale? Key pages can be anything, subscription to a newsletter, a secondary page for more information, a contact us page... etc.

A little modesty wouldn't hurt you know.

 

Like Koan said, conversion does not always mean as selling things.

I do not know what lawyers,plumbers,dentist,universities, etc,etc define what a conversion mean to them.
But they must define that conversion to something that measurable, if they want to track their ad and not just throwing out money.

Google could also use cookies to track the clicker of the ads to define how long the clicker stay on the "advertiser destination page". How many pages the clicker click("read") after arrive at "advertiser destination page".

"My assumption" is if most of the clicker from a publisher site only stay "a second" on "advertiser destination page" then leave. It could be consider as "bad conversion" and then could be lead to "smart pricing".

Again is just my assumption cause I am not google.
But "A CTR of under 3% will get you smart priced" is not seem logical to me.

 

what if your traffic is 90% returning type in or bookmark and only 10% from google?

 

what's my point? you keep claiming that advertiser roi and conversion rates aren't relevant to publisher epc, which is complete rubbish.

people have gone out of their way to correct the crap that you are posting out here, but you refuse to listen to any of it.

 

Ah, resorting to calling me a noob LOL means you have nothing left and know nothing of me.

Conversion rate. There are two conversion rates and you seem to be unaware of that. There is a conversion rate on YOUR site which is irrelevant to smart pricing. Google measures that by knowing how many impressions you have and how many clicks are made...simple math. Use a calculator. Conversion rate on the advertisers site is completely different. It is how well visitors from a particular site perform. ie, do they "convert" to sales? Google let's them measure that also. dreamforbrighterdays posted an excellent link which I cannot improve upon, so I suggest you read it.

And finally, there is logic. Why would you be penalized for having such poor clicks on your site? The advertiser doesn't suffer if your site only delivers 1 click out of every 1000 visitors, now does it? So why would you be smart priced for that. What if that one click turned into a sale for the advertiser. Your site would then be seen to him as having 100% conversion and he'd be very happy to have you advertising his ads. He isn't going to be upset at you at all, now is he?

 

Ok, let's go through these with concrete examples of well-known Google services:

This is easily done with Google Analytics. You can designate any page as a key page for conversion.. so it could be a purchase, signing up to a newsletter, just reading one specific article, watching the company's new video or whatever. In other words, conversion is not only a sale, but it could also be a sign-up, or if the advertiser has a branding goal he would be satisfied if you view certain pages or generally just surf around their page.

And how do we know that they actually track conversion, and that conversion is the basis of smartpricing? Because they state so themselves: https://adwords.google.com/select/afc/pricing.html

 

Thats a very interesting statement. I am new to this, please be good enough to explain a little further.