Just over a year Google Adsense announced Smart Pricing for Adsense accounts: http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html I completely overlooked it and now I'm examining my Adsense options. Question is, are Google even applying Smart Pricing any more? If so, is it for overall accounts, or just individual sites/channels? I'm not a huge Adsense earner, but I want to ensure I'm not crippling my income by leaving high view/low paying sites on. I am currently experimenting by taking a large forum out of the account, but so far it's been difficult to draw real conclusions. Does anyone have any useful info on Smart Pricing, whether still applied, and if so, in what way it may have been updated since Jen's post? Comments much appreciated.
it's still very much enforced, on accounts with at least one poorly converting site. ie, the whole account is smartpriced if one site just perfoms badly. performing badly doesn't mean few clicks or many clicks or this or that, it means that the visitors are somehow tricked into clicking the ads, and then after clicking do not perform what is generaly expected of them, ie surf the advertiser site / subscribe to a newsletter / buy something / whatever. if the ratio of clickers who do not perform the expected actions vs the clickers who do goes over a given threshold, then the whole account is smartpriced.
I think it is smartpriced based on sites. I got two sites which is badly smartpriced while my third site are unaffected.
Smartpricing looks to protect the advertisers and on the other hand it frustrates the publishers, smartpricing is described like the conversions has been made by the click, if less conversions found then the site will be smartpriced and the publisher will be paid below the minimum bid... this looks it punishes the publishers, but is this really a publishers problem? I don't think so, google says, 'the ads will be displayed that relates to the content' and the visitor interests any ad links they'll click and thats all for the publishers point of view, they don't have to worry about the conversion.. this is PPC and not CPA, so if the conversion is not held, how can the publisher will be responsible for that?? Have they included this smartpricing on their TOS ?? or every emailed to the publishers ?? There is lots of questions and who is going to answer...
to remove smartpricing, you have to remove the reason why you are smartpriced, ie, ads that are not converting.
Yes, but how do you know which ads are converting and which are not? I suppose one can expect MFA sites to convert poorly if at all, so they are safe to block, but other than that I think it's impossible to know.
I came to this thread after getting continuous clicks for .01 on a site I was getting at least .10-.50+ per click... I have come to the conclusion that Google owns - and what can we do about it but not use their system?