When Smart Pricing releases its grasp on your neck

... you can finally see the full monetary potential of your site

[NoLimits]

I can't attribute my recent hike in income to anything other than Smart Pricing.

I have made no changes in the last 30 days other than:
- Replacing low EPC pages with other Advertisers
- Continuing to add content

Although I am now sending less clicks than ever in AdSense's direction - the EPC has surged to a level that I didn't think it was capable of reaching.

I am sending half as many clicks, and making approximately 1.5 times what I used to. This trend started about a week ago, and continues the EPC continues to rise every day (for the last 7 days straight)

After months of fighting with smart pricing, and getting frustrated to the point of nearly dropping AdSense from my sites completely. It got really depressing seeing clicks come in at less value than what I could find by simply looking on the floor of my nearest convenience store. I was at the end of my rope, and started to pull from low EPC pages... determined to not "give away" visitors for the outrageously low amounts.

Now I'm making more than I ever have from AdSense... and even more from Chitika. What a wild ride. Never give up folks. While frustrating at times, it can be a VERY rewarding ride.

I simply wish I understood more about why/how the changes I made had such a drastic effect on my earnings.... and lastly I hope that they sustain their value in coming weeks and months.

[ken_b]

That's good.

I take it that you don't get a seasonal (holiday buying, etc) upswing at this time of year that could account for the gain?

[ZenArcher]

- Replacing low EPC pages with other Advertisers

If there's any forum wisdom that feels like science--not voodoo--it's the suggestion to remove the lowest EPC pages.

Works for me.

[macker123]

What percentage were the low ecpm pages to the rest of the account?

I have a ton of domains in my adsense account and about 20% are very low performing ecpm wise to the other 80%, which are amazing. I mean these 20% are getting like 10-100 times less ecpm than the other 80% even though they still earn a little bit of money.

So based on smart pricing I should remove these?

[ZenArcher]

I have a ton of domains in my adsense account and about 20% are very low performing ecpm wise to the other 80%, which are amazing. I mean these 20% are getting like 10-100 times less ecpm than the other 80% even though they still earn a little bit of money.

Given the low ROI of these domains, it couldn't hurt to experiment. If they are really that low (100x less), some affiliate links or third-party CPM ads may do better. I'd encourage you to experiment -- mix it up!

[sfatih]

Personally, removing the ads from the lowest ecpm pages helped me. They were about 20% of all pages and my overall earnings increased slightly instead of going down. After a few weeks like this, I made a second change by leaving only 1 ad block on each page, and it caused a spike in cpc although the ctr dropped to half. Still, the overall earnings increased over the first improvement. It has been at this state for more than a month and going good so far - one ad block per page and no ads on bad performer pages.

[pcgamez]

I did this last Saturday as well, though I have seen no positive change in any of my stats. I had a page that was ~50% of my impressions yet was only about 16% of my revenue (which was largely as a result of CPM campaigns I believe). Since I did this last Saturday, my revenue has dropped by about the 16% (my revenue varies greatly, so that doesn't mean all that much). Oddly enough, my CTR has not improved by a significant amount.

In unrelated news, I hate my pathetic CTR.

[Ankhenaton]

I removed 2 weeks ago all adsense code from smaller sites and the forum .. no detectable change whatsoever.

I put everything back up again.

[ZenArcher]

I removed 2 weeks ago all adsense code from smaller sites and the forum .. no detectable change whatsoever.

Was there no revenue change? Or no EPC change? Were the smaller sites smaller in traffic or in EPC?

I think you'll find that underperforming pages are hurting you, and these may be across different sites. That's why collecting and studying channel data is so valuable.

[Clark]

Great news but way too much work.

[sezampicika]

NoLimits

I have made similar things to my site, like you did to yours. First what I did was adding channels to see what pages are performing well.

I optimized bad ones, added new content.

...

And now, 5 days later I have my record day at AdSense!