Forum Moderators: martinibuster
$3K a month isn't exactly chopped liver, but if your life is ruined with such a pittance, maybe food stamps could help tide you over until you can fix what's causing smartpricing to kick in.
As far as im aware your allowed to remove your adsense code and put your adsense code on any site you wish given concent.
Personal observation:
Sometimes there are pages that get decent traffic and a horrendously low CTR (and probably lousy conversions, too). It might be better to pull Adsense off those pages and put on a quality affiliate program that's right on topic for users.
I've got one relatively non-commercial site that's got what looks to me to be what I'd guess is an occasional curiosity seeker clicking, and the CTR is way, way below normal. No sense keeping Adsense on that site's pages fouling up the averages and apparently no benefit to anyone; but there are a couple of excellent affiliate programs that would be a perfect fit. As long as it doesn't turn into a banner farm, I don't see any harm in making that kind of minor change.
Incidentally, I don't know how long you've been at this, but there can be huge seasonal fluctuations in some spaces, consistently, year after year. Also, a lot can depend on whether traffic has fallen or improved and what kind of keywords are pulling the traffic.
[edited by: Marcia at 10:39 am (utc) on July 2, 2006]
Smartpricing is a true killer.
In that one day test, did the ads, ctr, epc change?
Problem solved using your logic.
W.
from 500-600$ day to 100$ day
If you've been earning $15-20,000 per month for two years then direct your angst to Google for an explanation since it certainly does them no favours for legitimate earners to have such a reduction in revenue.
After all, your level of earnings is high enough for G to warrant investigation so it's worth their time to check and respond.
Which sector are you in?
If you've been earning $15-20,000 per month for two years then direct your angst to Google for an explanation since it certainly does them no favours for legitimate earners to have such a reduction in revenue.
Possibly the OP's site doesn't convert as well as it used to.
Same ads; same CTR; EPC down by 60%.
The only changes that have occurred during those 3 days, is my filter list finally reached 200 (two days ago)
So I feel your pain, greedy_player! (Although I didn't have your income, so I wish I were feeling that too!)
Same ads; same CTR; EPC down by 60%.The only changes that have occurred during those 3 days, is my filter list finally reached 200 (two days ago)
Google has warned that aggressive filtering can have a negative impact on earnings. You might want to consider deleting your filter list and watching your stats for a few days to see what happens.
Can't afford to lose users who might associate my site with those type ads.
Having had a terrible run with adsense, going steadily downward since November, I have gone back over my own actions over the past few months to when the slide began.
I think I found the one thing that has been escaping me though like the forest hiding the trees I just couldn't see it.
At this time I will not say what it is until I give it at least a weeks test...don't want to lead anyone in a false direction and the idea has never, to my knowledge, been discussed in here.
Have already begun the test and in 4 and a half hours I am showing a little improvement but I don't want it to be just wishful thinking.
When I feel certain I am on to something I will start a thread to tell others about it.
Here's hoping!
I guess the focus should be on "what convinced SmartPricing to cull my income"... Poor conversion, page twiddling, loss of advert relevance?
As a side note, $100/day is definately something I could live off here, though understandably we all live in different economic climates.
Okay, so smart pricing supposedly ruins a lot of people's income - however there has to be people out there for whom smart pricing is improving their results, naturally we'd tend not to hear from them about that.
Smart pricing can't improve your results, since it's an advertiser's discount from the nominal bid (i.e., from what they'd pay for a click from Google Search).
In other words, if a bid is $1.00, there's no way smart pricing can make the click worth more than $1.00. It can only make the click worth less or (in theory, and if you're very lucky) the same as the advertiser's bid.
"Smart pricing can't improve your results"
My whole understand of smart pricing is that it can increase the SHARE the publisher gets from the $1.00 the advertiser is paying.
If the site converts well, the publisher may get say $0.50 , but if it converts poorly, the EPC maybe low, say $0.10 . Am I wrong?
An improvement from $0.10 to $ 0.50 is substantial, and in this case smart pricing may be deemed to be positive for the publisher..
I am sure there are many sites that have seen an increase in the EPC for the same ads over time..
Those who convert well that is ..
My income has dropped in half as well since about feb-march and i must say That I'm going to email adsense because lately the ads on my site have nothing to do with the page, and there are a bunch of keyword spammers such as the ringtone sites, auction sites and other shopping sites.
We need a place that we could list a g channel block of all ringtone sites we want to ban,
An advertiser may have a maximum bid of $1.00 but rarely does one end up paying that for a given slot. Let's assume the average payment is $0.50. However if a site is a known good coversion site, the advertiser may have to bid a lot higher than $0.50 to obtain that spot (up to their ceiling of $1.00), conversely for a low conversion site the advertiser may end up paying less than $0.50
My whole understand of smart pricing is that it can increase the SHARE the publisher gets from the $1.00 the advertiser is paying.
The goal of smartpricing is to algorithmically normalize the content networks ROI to the advertiser, by automatically discounting their bid based on the expected conversion rate of each site. When it works, it's supposed to turn an advertisers $1.00 bid from a "I am willing to pay $1.00 per click" to "I am willing to pay $1.00 for a click from the content network that's as good as a click from the search network." Since the quality across the content network varies *dramatically,* some adjustments are required.
The advertiser who bids $1.00 may only pay half that on a site that smartpricing has declared is only worth 50% the "standard conversion" rate. The same "smartpricing discount" applies to all advertisers participating in the auction for ad space on that site.
To the best of my understanding, smart pricing not only lowers the amount that the publisher gets but also lowers what Google gets since the advertiser gets to pay less. I'd think that Google would like to keep smart pricing at a minimum. But what do I know?
Perhaps Google is concerned that it will lose advertisers if they don't do something to discount nonconverting clicks.
We get the surfers to their sites and I feel that they should be the ones held directly responsible since they can't convert them because of poor landing pages, poor presentation of product, etc.
Somehow it seems Google has the cart before the horse as we do our job, seems like the advertiser should do theirs.
Ann
It's a way to discourage drive-by-clicking. Especially since there's no shortage of subscriptions where you can organise to send a few thousand people through your pages and have them "accidently" click on adverts.
Why should non converting clicks be held against the publisher?
Advertisers pay the freight; it is in G's best interest to keep them around.
We get the surfers to their sites and I feel that they should be the ones held directly responsible since they can't convert them because of poor landing pages, poor presentation of product, etc.
The advertisers may be totally "at fault" for being unable to convert, but they have the option of taking their money elsewhere.
The thing is, we don't...or shouldn't be.
If the landing page is poor, then the advertiser will have a generally poor conversion rate, -irrespective- of who they advertise via.
You most likely will be smart priced according to the conversion rate of the people you send to them in relation to the advertisers' global conversion rate.
eg...
If the advertiser has a 1% conversion rate average with google AdWords and the visitors you send them have a 2% conversion rate, you will be smart-priced up.
If the visitors you send them have a 0.5% conversion rate, you will be smart-priced down.
(I'm speculating here - since that's the best we can do for most of AdSense)
ann, be nice, I can't wait for your theory.
