We all know what smartpricing is...okay, a lot of people think they know what smartpricing is and how it works. Well, very few know all the ins and outs of it, but the bottom line, as I understand it, is that it is what happens to your account (all sites in your account) when you are not passing on quality visitors to the publishers. You are penalized with lower earnings per click. What happens if this occurs too many times? If you are smartpriced 10 times, does that mean your site is hopeless and that it seems to just be junk clicks? If you are "smartpriced" a certain number of times, is your account in jeopardy as being a "risk" to advertisers? I don't know...just throwing this out for comments and rousing debate
well first off, this smart pricing crap is a rip-off! Google has floated this idea in webmaster forums about quality visitors and paying out the clicks if visitors are buying or not, well our job is to get the visitors in the sites, and it's the advertisers job to make a sale - Coca cola does'nt pay TV, Radio stations according to how many people run out to buy their canned drinks immediately after watching a commercial? Because the idea is to make an IMPRESSION on the consumers brain and how does google determine that? how does Google know a guy that visited xyz-tee-shirts.com from a adsense click a month ago, and bookmarked it only to go make a purchase later was a good click or bad click? what are they gonna do, give the publisher an extra .10 because the guy made a purchase a month after they had smart priced the adsense publisher's account? It's just another excuse for them to keep more money.
I totally agree with movidalatina. I don't know if there's such a thing as smart pricing, but if it does it's not so detailed. What DO happens a lot with me is this floating in the PPC, and I don't like it very much. I don't know if it got anything to do with SmartPricing, but it happens.
I don't know all the intricacies of smart pricing but if advertiser prefer a site in the content networks, those clicks are higher than run-of-the-web content site for the same keywords
movidalatina...your Coke analogy is flawed in that TV advertising is impression-based, not click based. Coca-Cola buys X number of views of their ad. They are like the person who buys 10,000 impressions of an ad, they don't pay if the ad is clicked. Per click is like us being paid for each person we bring in off the street to the Coke distributor, if we just bring in any bum off the street, I bet we'd start to be paid less per 'body'
How the hell does google know if your clicks are converting or not for the publisher? (most adsense advertisers are not using google analytics for tracking, and even if they where google supposedly isn't using this data.)
Google doesn't keep more when the smart price, in fact, smart pricing costs google money. Google gets a percentage (a little over 21% on average) of what they charge the advertiser. When they charge the advertiser less, they make less. The only reason that google started smart pricing is because the big advertisers were dropping out of the content network like flies. Without advertisers, there is no adsense. There are certainly sites that provide better converting traffic. If you're getting smart priced, your traffic isn't converting compared to other sites running the same ads. Yahoo started out without smart pricing - and people were getting $30 clicks ($5+ was common and anything under $1 was rare) - and as I predicted on DP, they lost much of their advertisers and were forced to go to their own form of smart pricing. Yahoo is still trying to get those advertisers back - and even with payouts that are now a joke, they still haven't gotten those advertisers back in close to a year.
Bid is the thing . lower bid lower earning and when luck and bidding goes down we earn low and we think we got Smart priced. I think day by day all adword users are getting clever and bidding as low they can. thats why its not like old days 1 click = 28$. And if we earn low tht means google earns low too. there is no way some one will try to loose money. But if Smart Price means 70% revenue goes to google then its different.
Wow, great point. I don't think that could have been any more descriptive. That makes a lot of sense.
Ah, but see my rebuttal above...and as far as a "month down the road" wasn't there some sort of "time-delay" on the CPA, ie referrals program. So if the person didn't convert immediately, it was still kept track of for a certain amount of time? Who's to say that that isn't in effect for adsense as well? I don't know if it is but if it was possible for referrals, why not.
Dear modivalatina, If you "don't know" how Google algorithmes can indentify a quality visitor this doesn't mean they can't. These Google geeks have shown great advance in artificial intelligence and I believe smart pricing is a smart programming work.
Let's add to this for everyone's sake. I got smartpriced somewhere in '07, and in my opinion - completely unpredictably. 90% of my clicks came from an authority blog with thousands of legit visitors daily, in a very specific niche in the fashion world, very shopping-oriented even... I went like crazy trying to figure out what had happened (sudden drop from +/- $0.10 per click to $.03/click) - and couldn't figure it out. As an exercise - I removed Adsense completely from ALL of my sites at that point, and started adding them one by one again. Even though this costed me a couple grand - it tought me one big lesson: ONE VERY BAD channel could, back then, destroy your whole account, if the volume of traffic was big enough. I had one web site that, even though it was a quality site with thousands of active users, hardly got any clicks and loads of impressions. When that site was de-activated for about 2 months - my EPC shot back to normal levels. Today, Google seems to be much smarter. My EPC has gone way up to about €0.15/click (.20-something in dollars) - and some sites are still very adsense-weak... Smartpricing must have cost a lot of people a lot of money - and probably made Google good money. I can't believe they didn't nibble away a little there... ;-) But in my opinion - it's been gone for about a year and a half...
This is for all of you that don't get smart pricing. Sometimes it isnt the quality of your visitor, its the quality of the advertiser. eg. The advertiser has a shitty page and the user stays on for <10 secs In this case Google will smart price YOU not the advertiser. There is a workaround to this for you newbs, it is called the competitive ad filter. Filter out all the shitty advertisers and watch ur CPC go up.
I have not yet got smart priced. When I do I'll just smart my way over to another advertising company.
I think in PPC, every click should have a minimal value say 5 cents and no click's earning should be less than that. Because this is not affiliate marketing where you would be paid for only sales or conversions. In PPC, we should get paid equally for every visitor we send to the advertiser's page.
I don't even know where to begin to tear this one apart Imagine you are paid "per head" to get people into a store. First you check people out, make sure they are interested in the stores merchandise etc and bring them in. Then you get greedy and start bringing in bums, derelicts, winos, and senators. Why should you get as high a "commission" for the latter bunch of folks?
I don't believe I have been smartpriced as I'm getting clicks in the region of £2 but I do get clicks with a low value and even on the sites which produce high clicks there have been occasions when I've seen 0 payment for a click. I assumed that these £0.0p clicks were from hostile clickers and nothing to do with smartpricing - would you agree? Also, there might be another reason for apparent smartpricing: Recently I've been experimenting with my adsense settings. When I changed from contextual with viewer history to contextual with content my earnings went right down. If they had done this without the change I'd have suspected smartpricing. I've now made changes to get rid of placement ads as they were not paying as much (when I discovered I could check this out). I'm hoping that doesn't set off smartpriced like clicks. I think the thread starter has a point - google advertisers want quality clickers - but surfers are generally of a good quality demographic - they are not homeless and seemingly can afford a computer and internet access. The greater problem is the quality of the advertisers' adverts. Today (for instance) I've seen a text ad with a misspelt word "Celebraty". I know myself that it is easy to set up an adword campaign and there is little quality monitoring. If I've a complaint about google the adword ad quality is it. What really makes my blood boil is adverts with direct telephone numbers which must circumnavigate the need to click - such advertisers are ripping us and google off and should be charged per impression.