Click referral & smart pricing

Do you see evidence of Google weighting the referral?

[max_mm]

Those who've been recently affected by smart pricing and see considerably reduced payouts par click recently. Do you see evidence of Google weighting the referral? hence, paying more per click for a G referred visitor (click) then lets say Yahoo or MSN referrals?

One of my sites (a software related site) lost all its G traffic at the beginning of March yet continued to receive Yahoo an MSN referrals at exactly the same rate. Almost immediately after, I started to experience very low click payouts $0.03-0.07 max.
(Used to be $0.12 – 0.50 in normal days)

G traffic returned (to 70% of normal) a couple of weeks ago and with it the click payouts I am used to seeing ($0.12 – 0.50) . Just wondering if anyone else has noticed or experienced such pattern.

[photo200]

would be interesting.
anyone else?

[bjseiler]

I've seen it happen with AdWords traffic that I was trying to arbitrage. I tried testing it out on a site three times. I turned on the traffic for a week, and then turned it off for a week. I did this three times. As this is a relatively new site, this is really the only traffic going to the site. Each week the adsense clicks would start out in a certain range and then steadily drop 10-20% per click per day for the rest of the week AdWords was turned on. It would seem that either the smartpricing is trying to figure out the value of clicks from that site or what is happening is my "netflix theory" where they pay you higher in the beginning and then they taper off.

[ncreegan]

I took this a step further and actually developed a system for tracking the earnings from each keyword when referred from G, Y, and MSN. I did't note any substantial difference between Google's traffic for "robotic widgets" and Yahoo!/MSN's traffic for "robotic widgets" but I did note a huge difference in earnings between subtly different keywords...

ie, "robotic widgets" brought a much higher EPC and eCPM than "what is a robotic widget?"

That of course is to be expected with smart pricing.

I don't believe Google weighs the referral directly, but I am absolutely positive that some sources of traffic are much better than others because they will convert better. That however, is just common sense.

ie, generally, somebody that ranks high in the natural results for "robotic widgets" will have higher EPC and eCPM than somebody who doesn't rank, but gets comparable traffic from a topsite.