I have noticed that when there's a significant drop in traffic, the effective CPM also drops down and never quite climbs up to its previous levels once traffic has been reinstated(both quantitatively and qualitatively). I do believe this is an effect of Google Adsense's so-called smart pricing, which I shall from now on call smack-pricing, because such a violent drop in ECPM feels to me like a huge slap on the face. My questions are: Has anybody else noticed the same thing? Searches for smart-pricing on DP yielded few results. How do you manage to bring your ECPM back up? Is e-mailing Google any good?
Smart pricing is determined by a number of factors, and google doesn't disclose their algorithms. It is basically a quality of traffic ranking - is the site an "authority site" and do the clicks you get convert for the advertiser? If people are clicking the ads, but not buying anything, or less compared to other sites, then google will reduce the amount it charges an advertiser - which reduces what you are paid. It is also believed that your account CTR is factored in. Google is going to show their better paying ads to sites with better CTR. WebMd is going to be served a high paying ad that a non-quality site won't. Google places a lot of importance on CTR for its Search Network. They will show lower paying ads that have a better CTR over an advertiser willing to pay more. Google makes more money on ad that get (10) $1 clicks from an advertiser vs an advertiser willing to pay $2 a click, but whose ad only gets clicked (2) with the same amount of views. Google will re-evaluate your accounts performance on a regular basis and make adjustments if they feel they are appropriate. Made for Adsense sites usually get smartpriced because their visitor is often clicking the ad to exit the site - or the layout produces clicks from people that don't buy anything. Emailing google isn't going to do any good. Improve CTR and quality of traffic to get higher paying ads. Look at it from an advertisers point of view - would they want to advertise on a MFA site, or an authority site? There are advertisers who pay 10X for google search ads, vs adsense content sites. "Google search" converts much better than the content sites (and isn't subject to publisher click fraud) as a general statement - and this is why they pay more. When you first start running adsense on a site, there is no performance "history" so you aren't smart priced until google evaluates your traffic. This is also why many people see higher paying clicks at the start. Many advertisers also opt out of the content network, or set much lower bids, so the highest paying ads never even show on adsense publisher sites.
There are days when I find cpc goes down substantially but then rises back to pretty much normal levels. I think smar pricing requires the cpc level to be substantially lower for a sustained period.