Smart pricing

curious move...

[JoaoJose]

Hi there. Just want to share this.

Yesterday I changed all my dynamic pages to static and I did not redirect the old pages to the new ones because I couldn't.

So basically SEwise I started almost from scratch (500 "new" pages) and as a consequence today's EPC is down 50%! Ouch....

Now I wonder if I had made the redirect my EPC would stay the same or not....

Anyway I think Google should disclose the basics of smart pricing for us to deal better with it....

[hunderdown]

But if that's smart pricing, then you were getting a bonus before, and are now back to square one. Smart pricing is supposed to be a discount from a bid price, not a bonus on top of it.

If you look back at your reports and see that your site started out with an EPC of X, and it had gradually risen to an EPC of 1.5X, you then changed your pages, and it dropped back to the original X, then I'd be more inclined to believe this was smart pricing.

If you can't see that trend, then I'd suggest this might be a targeting problem--AdSense seems to need time to fine-tune the targeting with new pages. You just gave it a bunch of new pages, right?

[valeyard]

I agree with Hunderdown, this probably isn't smartpricing. AdSense tracks which ads have better CTR and hence better expected revenue. By effectively feeding it a whole new bunch of pages you've forced it to reset the training data.

That said...

Anyway I think Google should disclose the basics of smart pricing for us to deal better with it....

I totally agree with that. I don't think it's relevant in this case - but that's one reason it needs to be better explained.

SmartPricing is a piece of FUD that neither publishers nor advertisers understand. It makes sensible business planning impossible. SmartPricing - and hence Google - gets blamed for lots of things that are probably totally unconnected.

SmartPricing should be put out of our misery.

[JoaoJose]

If you look back at your reports and see that your site started out with an EPC of X, and it had gradually risen to an EPC of 1.5X, you then changed your pages, and it dropped back to the original X, then I'd be more inclined to believe this was smart pricing.

AdSense tracks which ads have better CTR and hence better expected revenue. By effectively feeding it a whole new bunch of pages you've forced it to reset the training data.

I do see what you mean. And this is probably (we really don't know) true.

I do think that google is correct by applying a discount to new pages but I also think that the way the discount is applied should be disclosed. Furthermore if this was disclosed many more advertisers would use conversion tracking thus making smart pricing actually work for the benefit of both parts.