Social bookmarking is the new "thing" right now. Over 90% of webmasters use it to generate traffic to their site. Some even receive 80% of their total traffic from Social Bookmarking Networks. But none of them realize that they are harming their CPC ( Cost per Click) if their using Google Adsense on their website. The Truth If your one of those people with a low CPR(Click Through Rate)and low CPC, then take another look at your tracker to see from where your traffic is coming from. If your receiving heavy traffic from Social Bookmarking Networks and other Traffic Exchanges, then you've found your problem. Everyone knows that Social Bookmarking Networks provide a low CPR to your site, but what everyone doesn't know is that because of your low CPR, your CPC is getting reduced! Google wants to give its high paying advertisers good service, they want to put the advertisers ads on publisher sites that have a high CPR so their advertiser can receive quality traffic quickly.If your CPR is under 1%, then I'm sure that your average CPC is 3 cents or less. This is a classic example of the phrase " The rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Google loves to send MFA ads, Click Bank ads, smart priced ads onto your low CPR sites. Google doesn't care at all for your service, you bring them such a low CPR that they have no use from you, they just bomb you with all the smart priced ads. Google wants to provide the high paying ads to publisher sites that have a high CPR, knowing that this publisher site can move ads very quickly. They want to please these high CPR sites with higher CPC ads, so the webmaster of the publisher site stays happy and loyal to Google Adsense. How much traffic should you receive from Social Bookmarking Networks It's always good to know how much traffic your allowed to have from Social Bookmarking Networks before it effects your CPC negatively.The percentage that you should be aiming for is 25%. The only time you should ever have a percentage of 50 is if your other 50% traffic is all Organic. Meaning that the other half has to be all from search engines. Traffic from search engines is always the best, the webmasters with high search engine ranking always have the best CPR and CPC. How to trick the system There is always a way around anything, well same thing applies here. Unfortunately you won't be able to apply this on your current website, you can make a new website to apply this. As some of you know, there are high paying keywords out there, most of them have a CPC of $1 as their lowest. Now what you can do is create a website that's in a high paying niche. So, even if you recieve a low CPR which results in the reduction of CPC, you will still be averaging a nice buck or so. You don't have to worry about using your high paying websites with Social Bookmarking Networks if your goals for it is low. By Martin - http://traffic-building-optimized.blogspot.com/ -- Thanks for reading my article. If it was useful please leave a reputation. Visit my site for my tips also.
Smart pricing because of low CTR? I'm not sure I believe that. It should be smart pricing due to low conversions--if you get 100 clicks and only 1 convert, then your traffic is useless, thus being smart priced. If you get 100 clicks and 50 convert, then your traffic is valuable, thus NOT being smart priced. I don't think that CTR plays a role in whether you are smart priced or not. Just my opinion. Maybe someone more knowledgeable in smart pricing may elaborate a bit more.
mhmmmmm no I don't think that is right.... http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/facts-about-smart-pricing.html "2. Clickthrough rate doesn't affect advertiser return on investment (ROI) The percentage of clicks that convert for an advertiser is the most important factor in an advertiser's ROI, so it's not only possible, but common, to have a low CTR and a high advertiser conversion rate. It's also possible to have a high CTR and a low conversion rate. Don't remove the AdSense code from your site just because it has a lower CTR - it may be one of your best converting sites."
Also the kind of subject that your website has will impact the amount of click thrus you get. I've read that entertainment related websites like ign.com receive less click throughs than the news related websites like cnn.com.
FKA. It does play a great role in determining your CPC and in turn smart pricing. smart Pricing in my opinion is based on following conditions: 1) How well your site converts? If you receive 10000 page views and only get 100 clicks then it's not converting good. 2) Quality of visitors- Are you receiving hits from unique visitors or repeat visitors? Again source of your pageviews? 3) Are your visitors converting for advertiser? All these points indicate smart pricing. To get rid of it, you need to get more traffic from SE, which converts better and that should pull you out of Smart pricing. Reps appreciated
I have experienced this to some extent. Here's an idea as a test: create two pages with basically the same content. #1 - Page You'll Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites #2 - Regular page that gets promoted on your site from regular visitors 1. Submit #1 to all the popular social bookmarking sites. 2. Let #2 receive traffic as normal. Create AdSense channels to track the CTR and eCPM of each page, respectively. Then you'll know for sure how much G penalizes you for low CTR resulting from social bookmarking visitors. (I have found CTRs from social bookmarking visitors to be lower, but you can still make $$ from them)
Sounds like a load of rubbish to me, never seen CTR have any effect on CPC in adsense. In adwords it does have an effect.