I started running a small network of sites recently, so I'm very paranoid about smart-pricing, since one site can ruin it for the rest. In case you don't know what smart-pricing is, the best definition I heard can from http://www.jensense.com/ : I was up very early this morning. And my money site had 1 click. Normally, I expect this click to be anywhere from .43 cents to $2.25. It was .10 cents click. I freaked. I'd just added Adsense to a new site in the network, and I pulled the ads immediately. After I did this, I went back to the money site. Since it was so early, I could see I only had four visitors. They were all from Eastern European and Asian countries - and I relaxed. Clicks from outside the US, France, Great Britain and Australia pay less. Considerably less. Also, all the traffic to the new site was organic. Which means that someone wanted something and was looking for information. They'd found the new site in the SERPs. Therefore they were more like to convert into a click and a customer for the Adwords advertiser. So I put the ads back in. Anyone who has a tattoo or entertainment site knows that the clicks pay very little, but the sites get tons of traffic. Well, 17 clicks on the new site paid over $7 dollars in one day - thank you Google. If I hadn't have put ads on the new site before the end of the month, I wouldn't have made my $100 for the month...it was that tight. And I was trying for the $200 mark this month. I've been getting .95 cent clicks from niches that normally pay .03 to .10 cents a click. And this is not just some Adsense advertiser paying too much. This has been happening over a two month period of time. I've always had a problem driving traffic. However, my click through rate is really, really good. And after building one or two websites for pleasure, in the past 7 months, I've started building them to make money. (I took on too many at one time and now I'm back to working on them one at a time, I did a crappy job building a lot of them and expected results too soon.) So like everyone else, I'm still working on understanding how this all works. However this allowed me to test a number of things, and and I've found that on-site SEO is key. So is unique content. AND SO ARE ... Reciprocal links. Now I've seen a lot of boat load of posts that say reciprocal links are bad and one way links are the only way to go. You need to reread the Google stance on reciprocal links. They consider them bad if they're only there to drive PR. So if you run an acne site and someone else runs an acne site and you exchange links: 1. the traffic that comes from their site to yours is more likely to convert into a click, because they're specifically looking for acne information, 2. and Google is less like to discount the reciprocal link because it's acne to acne. (If you do acne to insurance brokers - they'll clobber you.) Home page to home page reciprocal links are gold. (Just remember blog rolls seem to be taking a hit. Try to get your link outside the blog roll script.) The age of the link is very important to Google, so if you post a comment on a high ranking blog and they pick it up from the front page - you need to remember it won't be there in a few days, for a really popular blog, perhaps a few hours. Your comment will be stuck on a non PR inner page and your ranking through comments will fluctuate like crazy, unless you constantly post. I don't have the time. If you notice, your Stumble Upon traffic almost never converts to clicks. They're surfing, not searching. (If your Stumble Upon traffic converts, let me know. Not trying to steal a niche - just want empirical data for when SU actually works for a webmaster.) And if they do convert to clicks, they are less likely to buy from the advertiser, therefore you are more likely to get smart-priced from Google. I want to point out is targeted or niche websites and blogs very rarely get smart priced (unless their traffic is from social media.) If you blog about everything under the sun - then yes, your visitors and your Adsense ads are not going to match. Cut down on your home page articles until you only have one or two articles on your front page about related subjects. That way you have one set of ads presented to your visitors and the ads match the article. Now, I'm not saying that Google isn't out to get you. I have a penalized and a banned site to prove it. (Google has no problem with me showing Adsense on these sites, - one took a SERP hit and one is not in the index, - thank you Yahoo for the number one listing for each site's keywords and I'll never ignore submitting my sites to you again.) And for the banned site, I actually don't know what happened. But usually when a site is smart priced, it's the site owner's fault and not Google's greed. Now, your earnings tanking over-all in the past month - that's a different story. ----- Note: I'm still learning the social media aspects of the web and how to drive traffic using it. Like I said, I'm still learning.
Great post Valkerie I did manage to find a few small niches that stumbleuponers click ads in (and not being smart priced either)... but they're mine! Not sharing! Took me around 20 "wow, these ads are doing awful" sites before I found them though.
Thanks, Random Guy! I simply wanted to get a general idea, not a specific niche. I've been impressed with Stumble Upon for driving traffic, since 200 people hit one of my websites from Stumble in a single afternoon...and didn't click on a darn thing. I respect your being reluctant to share, however. I don't exactly go around yelling out my good niches. And I only use my signature for stuff that under development or is affiliate related. The other day one of the directory newsletters had a post about Google not buying into social networks because they didn't know how to monetize them and I had to laugh.
thats a good info posted, but i have read a thread saying Smart pricing is a myth?..well im not sure if it is..
How do you verify if you're getting smart-priced? Is there an actual tool you can use? Curious about that
There's no actual tool for telling if you've been smart priced. You have to use your judgment and have an idea of what keywords in your niche pay. If your run an insurance site or mesothelioma site and you're getting .03 cents a click - something is wrong. If you run an entertainment or tattoo site and you're getting .03 cents a click, it's par for the course. But in these niches, if you NEVER get a click worth more than .03 cents, you've probably been smart-priced.