Will retiring low CTR pages increase my CPM?

I'm unclear about how Smart Pricing works.

[Broadway]

My site is broken in topics, each topic corresponds to a keyword. The keywords assoicatated with some topics (about 1/2 of my site's traffic) don't really work all that well with Adsense (low paying ads, somewhat off target ads) and the CTR on these pages is low. The CPM for these pages is low too.

The other 1/2 of my site's pages do well with Adsense. They have what I consider decent CTR and CPM. (The CPM is about 10 times higher for these topics than what it is for the non-performing topics.)

If I removed Adsense from my poor performing topics my site's over all CTR would increase 2 or 3 fold. Would it be expected that related to Smart Pricing that this boost in site CTR would boost CPM? Is this how Smart Pricing works? I'm not a mathematician but I guess anything over a 10% boost in CPM would make up for the lost revenue from the dropped topics.

[tebrino]

Yes, your CPM will increase, but your earnings will be lower. Even bad performing pages have some performance

[annej]

I tried this and didn't see any real difference. I've put adsense back on some of them. They were mostly content pages for sections or topics and that kind of page never seems to do as well as visitors are more likely to move on to an article on the site. I find people are more likely to click when they finish an article.

[annej]

It just occured to me to wonder how low CTR has to be to be affected.

Also if there is an effect like this does it only affect that one page or the whole site. If it only makes a difference on the same page it seem to me it wouldn't matter if you kept adsense on or not. Now if low CTR pages are hurting the whole site that is another matter.

[Broadway]

I agree. If CTR affects CPM the question would be whether Adsense calculates the effect on a per page or a per site basis.

If your experiment involved a large percentage of your site's pages (and therefore did boost your site's overall CTR) and you noticed no significant change in CPM then it would suggest that the effect of CTR on CPM is calculated on a per page basis, meaning there is no benefit to dropping low performing pages from Adsense.

[europeforvisitors]

If your experiment involved a large percentage of your site's pages (and therefore did boost your site's overall CTR) and you noticed no significant change in CPM then it would suggest that the effect of CTR on CPM is calculated on a per page basis, meaning there is no benefit to dropping low performing pages from Adsense.

Unfortunately, since the publisher has no control over the many other variables that go into CTR, EPC, and CPM, the apparent results of the experiment may be deceptive.

In any case, it really wouldn't make sense for Google to penalize publishers for having a low CTR, because that would make AdSense less attractive to legitimate publishers who use AdSense as it was intended: i.e., as a way to monetize their existing content. Besides not wanting to encourage the get-rich-quick-with-high-value-keywords crowd, Google has a vested interest in encouraging publishers to use AdSense on all their pages, because even low-performing pages will generate revenue for Google.

[dmedia]

As I understand it .. smartpricing uses metrics related to QUALITY over QUANTITY ..

Advertisers (AFAIK) can include some code or something or other on their end to track actions .. orders or inquiries or whatever ..

If you send a bunch of clicks that simply don't "convert" well for the advertiser(s) .. then smartpricing penalizes you .. better quality clicks that convert will boost your percentage of payment ..

Or something like that .. (please correct if I'm in error)

Meanwhile .. I've been experimenting with removing ads from areas I've had hunches have not been converting well .. marginaly qualified traffic pages and so on ..

Nothing earth shattering to report .. overall click rate has gone up along with earnings per click .. but then again, I have fewer clicks ;)

[europeforvisitors]

As I understand it .. smartpricing uses metrics related to QUALITY over QUANTITY ..

Yes, but it isn't necessarily determined by site or account. (Google isn't saying.) It's more likely that, say, a site with product reviews and a forum would have different smart-pricing discounts on the two types of content. After all, if Google is capable of matching ads to individual pages and tracking statistics for individual pages, it's certainly capable of calculating more than one "smart pricing" discount within a site.