I was surprised I couldn't see this in the list of topics so if I am repeating I apologise. http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html The bit that scares me is "Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis." How can that be a good thing? I dont want to setup a new company and a new account for each site, but I don't want poor performance on one of my sites to affect the revenue of another site!
Smart Pricing is just another reason why we all should not rely on adsense but opt for other review generating ads such as chitika... I do think that Smart Pricing over ones entire account is not fair play.. I have been hit very hard but alas no matter how much tweak... smart pricing kicks in after 24 hours... and I'm back to square one...
On the other hand, some publishers say they have evidence that Smart Price affects only certain pages of their sites, not the entire account. So far, Adsense declined to say how Smart Price is applied. I guess we'll have to wait to know how this is really working.
If you read the original article I link apparently those details came direct from adsense support (someone said more than they were supposed to according to jensense..)
No. If you check WW, you'll find out that Jensense is quoting something some guy says an Adsense employee told him. It's hard to take that as a conclusive evidence.
I can't handle the WW site. Too much chaos for me I did see that she was quoting information from someone else and did say "apparently" and "according to" for that reason but it does make sense to me when I look at my own adsense account details.
All this talk about Smart Pricing... true or false... all I know is that SP has hit my whole account... as my earnings are down by 100 bucks in October despite the fact that my clicks and impressions have doubled over the same period of time... Should things not change this month... I will be deleting adsense ads from most of my pages... and stick with chitika...
I have experienced this first hand, smart-pricing affects the entire account. I add new sites/channels daily, this is what I keep seeing. I don't have conclusive evidence, but from my experience, no one else is going to be able to convince me otherwise.
dzcap... I agree with you totally... however, how and what can we do to tweak our sites to generate better CTR and CPM... my stats are pitiful... Made more money today with chitika than adsense... never thought that would happen so quickly... Any suggestions on how best we can overcome Smart Pricing I'm all ears...
I don't have a solution yet, but so far I am experimenting with finding a threshold level. ie. finding out the highest CTR% possible without being hit by smart-pricing. If we could overcome this, revenue should increase by a minimum of 1/3.
I agree with the suggestion that it appears only certain pages are affected. I've seen HUGE drops in what I get paid for certain keywords on certain pages. The index page on one of my sites is now paying 25% of what it used to, with the exact same advertisers. However, some other pages on the same site with the same advertisers pay about the same that they used to. I had never seen a $.05 click a month ago, but I've noticed several lately. I usually notice them when on a single-page channel early in the morning. Whether it's Smart Pricing, or Google cutting our share of the $, it sucks. I'm liking Chitika so far, and it's a relatively new program. I'll try YPN out too when I get an invite.
There are so many variables I doubt anyone could draw a conclusion just from watching their own stats. Bid pricing is highly fluid, the earnings for the first ad in a skyscraper could be worth 10 times the price for the bottom one without knowing what the current bids are and which ad in a list was clicked we know nothing. My understanding is that smart pricing has more to do with how the person got to the click rather then the page, site, or account the click was on. On componant that I beleive G published is that if your top bid is significantly higher then the next bid they drop it a bit and don't charge the full amount. Or, on my paranoid days I think smartPricing is G's way of making me take two steps back for every step forward and keeping my earnings per day stuck where they are
Regardless of the algo for smart-pricing, it is undenieable it affects the entire account, which is what this thread is supposed to be for.
Yes, Google has confirmed this in the official AdSense blog, in the first point of their reply to the recent rumors: In different occasions, Google has mentioned factors of smart pricing (a.k.a. "AdWords discounter") in both sides: publisher and advertiser. However, they keep confidential most of the information related to Google algorithms. Everybody agrees that the algorithms must be complex and constantly modified, as Google says. Given this complexity, different AdSense publishers have different experiences, and while some of them notice an account wide effect under some circunstances (such as having a high traffic but extremely low-performing site), publishers frequently report getting smart pricing effect for specific sites or pages and not for others. Therefore, even if general publisher performance (the account effect) seems to have weight sometimes, it seems (just seems) that more importance is usually given to specific site and page performance, and to other "many factors" of smart pricing. But this comes from publishers' experiences. The relative weight of different factors is not confirmed by Google, so we can be wrong. In the past, Google has talked mainly about factors such as publisher's page or site performance (AdWords Learning Center), and advertiser's individual term performance (AdWordsAdvisor), but not much about the other many smart pricing factors.
So what do people think is the real story then? I have a few sites that have a good CTR and I would rather isolate them and avoid any smart pricing penalties by putting them into a new account but it's a lot of effort for something that won't actually make any difference to my bottom line.
I'm sorry did I miss something? How is it that I am to believe that "smartPricing" is account wide? I have read nothing yet that confirms your assertion that it is undenieable.
Well I've witnessed it myself and that's what I am going with. At first I thought no fu*king way also but it seems like a credible blog entry shares the same views as me. Not to mention I suspected it was account-wide a few weeks back before the blog entry. If you choose not to believe it, suit yourself. My advice is start making more adsense accounts and/or more over to YPN.
Let's not get into a debate whether or not Smartin Pricing is account wide... Do yourself a favour and ask google... and when they answer you... if indeed they ever will... please post their answer here... I for one would be most interested to see the results... All I know is that my account earnings have decreased by half across the board despite the fact that my clicks and impressions have double in the last two months...
In my experience it is not account wide. I have had (for example) a first click of the day of $1.80, the next click(on a different site, same account) for just 13c, a few clicks later another for 75c. For me, it is just too random to even contemplate.