Google sets a cookie that's good for thirty days. So this would count as a successful conversion. As far as income goes, income isn't tied directly to whether any individual click converts or not. Google applies smart pricing when its algorithms determine that a click on a certain type of site has a lower chance of converting. It is all statistical, not on an actual click by click basis.
That's crazy. A car site might take a year to convert. A magazine site might take 10 minutes to convert. How can they apply systemwide one simple algorigth,m like that?
Can somebody tell me when smartpricing started? My earnings per click is down 50% from around the 30th of October so I am wondering if my site is one of the poor converters that you are discussing? Cheers Sara
In April of 2004, there was a major change in the AdSense and AdWords algorithms, introducing the expected conversion (they said "expected value") of each web page for advertisers. Before, there was a simpler smart pricing, but people sometimes talk about smart pricing starting that date because of the important changes announced on April 1, 2004.
I'd like to share my experience with one of my site. Recently the site got PR of 5, and 80% of traffic comes from google search, but not plenty, about 20 visitors/day total. I noticed that there was one click which paid me $1.90, which I've never seen before. My thinking is that once a site is ranked suitably well in Google, and get a decent PR, the payment rate also increase a little bit. When the site was at PR 0, I got just a few cents per click. Same argument which those many mesothelioma sites. Most of the clicks will only give you a few cents, UNTIL google decides otherwise By the way, my site is about AdSense tips and tricks, which I found extremely competitive to get traffic.
Well, 20 visitors daily from google is better than none, especially on competitive traffic. I've seen people here grumbling about never getting any traffic from google from highly searched keywords. My point is that google does determine which website they will put on high-paying ads (based on content or whatever). So, that means, just because someone has a Vioxx lawsuit does not mean the income-per-click would be big. Hence the "smart pricing" we're discussing here.
I have a web site with PR6 and expecting PR7 in nearest future. My site has about 500K page views monthly, so I have more then enough data to calculate some statustics. And I may say - I didn't notice any change in average banner cost. Yes, I have noticed banners worth 3-4 bucks, but the average is still about 20 cents. So, I can say basing on experience that there is not correlation between PR and banner cost.
Less, My site went from PR0 to PR5. So an increase of income-per-click from tiny 5 cent to around 50 cent now sounds about right, judging from the quantum of Pagerank leap. I suppose yours is from PR6 to PR7, so might not be that explicitly clear? Just my thought. Also you have 500K hits per month, that's a lot! The probability of someone clicking on low-paying ads would be higher in your case than tiny website like mine.
Let's say smart pricing is good for everyone in the long run, with the advertisers seeing better ROI and whatnot. Here's a question: Where is the money going that used to go to publishers??? AdWords is certainly not giving breaks to advertisers for using the content network....so the money is going back into Google's pockets. How are advertisers benefiting from publishers receiving less money? Unless it's meant as a deterrance for spammers to use the Adsense service, in which reputable sites will also therefore stop using the Adsense service in lieu of the new Yahoo service. Google couldn't have picked a worse time to do "Smart Pricing" with Yahoo and Chitika now in the running. -Brian renner entrepreneur7
I highly doubt that Google is pocketing the money. Advertisers are paying less for certain clicks (on low converting sites) and more on other clicks (high converting sites), so in the end it evens out, and the advertisers get more ROI for their money.
With respect, that is doubtful. Prices are going way up on adwords and income from adsense is going down. There is only one entity in the middle where that money has to be going.
The money doesn't "go" anywhere. Advertisers pay less per click than they would if smart pricing didn't apply. That's the whole reason for smart pricing, so advertisers don't have to pay as much for "bad" clicks.