My experience with smart pricing

After being hit by AdSense smart pricing, trying a few things out to get rid of it (no luck) and waiting until it vanished, I fell it is now time to share with you my experience with smart pricing and things I learned during the process.


How did it happen?
Exactly like jackburton described many times here in DP forums. My AdSense earning had been growing slowly but almost continuously, with its inevitable ups and downs. One week earnings were much higher then ever. Suddenly… bang… my account was heavily smart priced! Average Cost Per Click (CPC) dropped to 60% of what it used to be. A couple of days before I created a new website that also had AdSense on it. I thought this was for sure the cause of smart pricing. I was wrong!

What did I do?
In the beginning I acted like a crazy mind. I searched for info here on DP, I googled everything about smart pricing. Depending on what info I found, one minute I removed AdSense from the new site and other minor ones, but a couple of hours later I changed my mind and put the ads back to their places. It took me a couple of days to start acting “normally” again. Then I eventually removed the ads from the other sites and left them only on my main site for a week. By that time I was still thinking the new site could have something to do with being smart priced. I checked AdSense stats all the time, but nothing was changing, CPC was still about 60%.

What happened after one week?
Exactly one week later (same week day) my CPC dropped even more, to about 40% of what it used to be before smart pricing. So the new site was obviously not the cause for smart pricing, so I put the ads back in all sites. By that time, I felt there was not much I could do. I decided to wait. This was probably the best decision I made during all the smart priced period.

Waiting. Frustration. Trying to work without thinking in smart pricing.
Two weeks latter, nothing happened. I had a nice amount of traffic and good CTR, but a horrendous CPC. I couldn’t be more frustrated than I was. I started to consider all possibilities, including stop investing my time on the websites. I had the feeling that some day smart pricing will go away, but that day was taking too long. In the end the "give up thought" didn’t win the brain battle, and even though I was working for peanuts in the short term, I decided to take the time to write new quality content. This was the second good decision I made.

How did smart pricing disappear?
Just as it first hit my account: suddenly. Exactly four weeks after my account was smart priced, CPC return to what it used to me. Just like that. After a month of despair my sites started to perform better than before. CPC is the same than it used to be, but in the meantime I had created more quality content. So traffic grew.


Lessons
If I had to summarize the lessons I was taught about being smart priced I’d say: Don’t panic. Don’t remove ads from new sites unless you’re absolutely sure they are the cause (but how can you be sure which ones are the poor converting ads?). Be patient. Try not to become too frustrated and keep working on new quality content even if it feels like you’re working for nothing. You know, most likely there’s nothing you can do about smart pricing and eventually time will fix things up.



Talking about the future, will my account be smart priced again?
I’ m afraid it will, but that will probably be a good sign. Think positive!


That was it. Hope it helps anybody affected by AdSense smart pricing.

 

you mentioned giving up on making websites all together. you (and anyone else that plans to make serious money online) need to realize that adsense isn't the only way to monetize websites. I don't care if your CPC is great right now and always has been-- adsense is not stable. it's not something you should rely exclusively on. you need to diversify, both in terms of niches AND in how you monetize sites.

and just because the CPC drops doesn't mean it was because it was automatically smart pricing. clicks are bid on. one major player dropping out of the bidding process (or drastically lowering what they'll pay per click) can have a huge, huge impact.

 

Interesting I am having a simlar problem, The thing that strikes me most is the fact of adding sites, for myself this resulted in considerably more impressions with little increase in clicks causing my click through rate to dive for my account as whole. I play the other side of the fence at work
& we are rewarded for having very high click throughs on my PPC. My gut tells me this could also be a factor in triggering this smart pricing, only time will tell though

 

I have sites that are extremely smart priced. But my other sites still get 0.75c a click. So the smart pricing doesn't seem to be account-wide

 

I just wanted to say Great Post.

Smart pricing is something people are all trying to dodge and find loopholes for and quick fixes that allows them to "exploit" the AdSense system - but it seriously is a waste of time. Fmgones has hit the nail on the head I think - sit back and start working on stuff that you CAN change instead of focusing on things that you can't change and feeling like "Google is ripping you off".

Though I would say that if you slipped in a little info about diversifying a bit I'd say this was an all round top notch post that might encourage a few to wake up a little bit and smell the roses.

People really should be out there building wonderful content which like Fmgones has said, results in more traffic, then worry about monetising it. I'm quietly confident that even if Google went arse up tomorrow if there were site owners out there with enough traffic they could still be making a living, because there is always something to sell and as long as you have people flowing through your site you have POTENTIAL $$'s visiting your site everyday.