A Dumb Question About Smart Pricing

How long does take to establish itself?

[Khensu]

I have just recently flipped 1/3 of my pages back from YPN to Google and found that my clicks went up by 2.5X in value.

The consensus is that I was smart priced.

What are other publishers data on how long the period is before smart pricing takes hold?

I am thinking of rotating my half my site at a time on 10-15 day interval from Adsense to YPN and back to Adsense. (just clone the pages with the different ad codes and store them offline)

Pros? Cons? Repercussions?

Also, I think we should be able to set minimums and have an alt ad take over if the advertiser's ad offering price is too low. I think this might help on the MFA issue also. If we make it too expensive to do business they can't exist.

[G_Smitty]

Sounds like a plan. Keep us updated on how it works out.

[proboscis]

Another dumb question: what is smart pricing and how do I know if I have been smart priced?

[Khensu]

Smart Pricing as far as I know is supposed to be based on advertiser conversion success but I think more of it is CTR %. I have an adwords account have been continually dropping my prices from Dec until now. I have a free giveaway so I have to keep the cost down to turn a profit on the YPN/Adsense side. I have continually been able to drop my content and search click price from .05 to now .01. I get 1,500 per day at $15 (which is 2.5x in profit). And the search is on 4 high traffic keywords in my niche and puts me last position page one or first page two (ctr 5%).

I should not be able to do this.

[futuresky]

I'm certainly not saying you're doing this Khensu, but could this indicate that there's a possibility of advertisers manipulating their conversion rates so that google sees a low conversion and thus charges advertisers a lower rate than they should be charged. I've just looked at the "help" section of my (very small) adwords account (I don't use conversion tracking by the way) and looked (admittedly brieffly) at how conversion tracking works (which seems to affect smart pricing) and it's got me worried that shady adwords users could purposefully make it difficult for a "conversion" to be recorded. This is worrying me as an adsense publisher, especially seeing as Adsense epcm seems to be dropping like a stone.

[Nitrous]

Khesu

This is the reason I ban all sites that dont sell anything directly.

[Khensu]

Ah, the perennial Nitrous.

I am doing nothing abnormal, I don't know how. I barely know html and cut and paste everything. Anything shady is actually beyond my programing scope because I know zip.

But I am a good artist and people love my stuff.

I really don't want the one cent clicks, I have enough traffic from SERPS. I have a major keyword locked-in for 8 years at #1 on G,Y & M plus another 20 page one listings. I would much rather make better money on the clicks normally and not be able to do it, I am just illustrating the problem. They smart price me then I am going to take the cheap clicks to make it up.