Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Nowadays I've been around $40, my CPC is as low as $0.01, my eCPM is $0.30 max.
I tried raising my CTR (I get from 0.8% to 1.2%) and CPC did raise a bit, but not that much, so I'm pretty much stuck.
I was wondering if any publishers ever got rid of Smart Pricing? How?
What comes to my mind is raising my CTR a lot (by reducing ad views on some pages), but would that be enough?
What do you think? Anyone ever tried that? I've seen several people being hit by smart pricing, did they ever get over it?
Thanks
Some sites will simply not work for Adsense, no matter how hard it is tweaked or optimized.
The End
I've been working this 'reverse smart pricing' angle for a few months now and my earnings have been going steadily up with roughly the same traffic. The site content and ads appear to be more on target with each other than ever before so I'm assuming conversions are improving for the advertisers and that results in better income for me.
Just a theory but it's one that seems to be working at the moment.
narrow your SEO per page to filter traffic to be more selective about the subject matter.
That's the key, I believe. I get high CTR on most pages on most of my sites, and smart pricing has yet to rear its ugly noggin. Could be much more complex, of course, but that sounds logical to me. BILL, stop being logical. You're frightening the children.
Use channels and see if you've got pages that get no clicks or no clicks to speak of. Take AdSense code off those pages.
Ok, it's a free games websites, maybe it's really not the best place to use adsense, but being a non-english site thats pretty much my only option.
I have about 60k uniques a day now, and having adsense on prime spots for $40 a day is not working, considering I send them up to 3k clicks a day.
Also, writing content pages is not much of an option to me, so I guess I'm stuck with 300k impressions a day for $40.
I'll try to raise a lot of my CTR as suggested, but I'm starting to think I'll never see those great (for me) $0.08 cpc days.
Thanks everyone, I'll let you know how it turns out.
My site has never been hit big by smart pricing, probably because it's a niche content site whose visitors convert well, but my CPC declined slowly from March/April in 2004, when smart pricing was introduced, until I started making some changes in September. Pulling the code from non-performing pages and working on ad position has my CTR at about 3x what it was, and CPC has gone back up to pre-smart pricing levels.
This technique won't work for everyone but it has for me and several others who have posted about it.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but will removing the code from certain pages cause other pages to do better?
I've heard this theory before and I don't buy it as impressions are meaningless, so what if you have a page that performs poorly, it's what happens when someone actually clicks that makes a difference.
However, they are measuring conversions, it just doesn't work.
You're right, if your site doesn't result in conversions then it doesn't work for the advertisers. The value of your site to an advertiser is based on the advertisers actual sales and if you don't make conversions your ad space is useless.
Doesn't mean your site has no value, but it has no value to those advertisers.
hmm
I see ownerrim withdrew the comment I replied to just as I posted it.
Hmmm indeed.
To get rid of smart pricing write content pages for product reviews. Ex: if your site was about photography, write product reviews of digital cameras. Now smart pricing will vanish from those pages at once
How does this work? Is it because smart pricing dissapears because G notices it's a 'more valuable' page, or is it because the clicks convert better?
We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
GOOGLE DOES NOT monitor your page see how well it converts then determines how to use smart pricing.
Um, AdWords advertisers do have code to plug into their site to monitor conversion so I'd bet that's part of the formula.
Google says explicitly:
[adwords.google.com...]
How smart pricing works
We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites
Sounds like conversion tracking to me!
Check out these articles on the topic:
[clickz.com...]
[clickz.com...]
The system is tilted infavor of the advertisers.Better you use direct affiliate programs, and banner ads on heavily trafficked pages than adsense.
If your site doesn't provide what people are looking for in order to make conversions direct affiliate programs won't perform any better.
IMO, your best bet in that case is selling advertising at a fixed rate flat price on your site like AdBrite does.
Anyway, here are some suggestions for other people hit by smart pricing:
AdBrite and alike
Target First
Kanoodle Bright Ads
Chitika
I'd suggest not staying on PPC only, you might end up making more with CPA, Sales and even CPM.
So you can't get rid of it. It's not on or off--it's always on, but to different degrees.
By the way, I know people are skeptical that increasing CTR can increase CPC. To my mind, even if it doesn't, it's worth taking AdSense code off pages where it doesn't perform well anyways, because I have bettter things I can do with that space. And perhaps you do too.
By the way, if your goal is to "get rid of" smart pricing, I think none of the suggestions offered here will help.
I don't think anyone said you could get rid of smart pricing, only that it was theoretically possible that you could improve your bids in smart pricing.
I've never tried doing what I've done re: smart pricing to any web site other than my own so it's a data sampling of one, but my average CPC is definitively up to the tune of an extra $50/day. Nothing spectcular, but it definitely ads up over a month.
I hope now you got my point, and I see nothing incredible about it.
i never said there was no converstion tracking going on! i said that:
Sure, OK, good theory -- or do you have a link to a statement from Google saying this is true? 'cause the Google statement you linked to earlier definitely does not say what you're saying, and definitely does include the possibility of tracking conversions on a per-page basis.
When Google says:
We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
Note that the quote above references both site AND page examples. So smart pricing could be based on the entire site, or it could be based on a per page basis, it appears they've been deliberately vague on this topic.
Maybe ASA will chime in with some words of wisdom to guide us?
After 2 or 3 days, the smart pricing clicks in on the pages, and WHAMMO, more money for me. I assume the delay is because it takes a few days for the conversions to register on the new ads.
I did what some guys suggested, adding channels to every single page to study the CTR.
Doing that I managed to increase my CPC slightly on good performing pages, and now I know what pages have CTR below 0.5% and are making just a couple of cents per day.
In the end I increase my AdSense earnings by increasing CTR on some pages and removing it from others, and it also increased my general earnings because I can add other advertisers on the space previously used by adsense.
Good luck for everyone who might wanna try this out!
First point made by many in this thread is that some sites don't work at all with adsense. In that case, alternatives are worth pursuing. I have some pages that have never worked with adsense so I just don't bother putting banners on. I use fastclick to get me a small cpm revenue from these pages.
The other point that has been made in this thread is that what converts best for advertisers is likely to be targetted clicks from quality content. Therefore working on the content is worthwhile.
I have one observation - smartpricing hates change, and always reacts against you. If you make changes to your page such as altering the position of the ad blocks etc that affect any of the stats, you end up suffering until it recovers. That can take a couple of weeks. It seems to me that if your ctr is pretty stable then smartpricing won't go too off the rails when you get an increase in clicks (as happens). If you are in a constant state of experimentation then smartpricing is going to keep you low until it sees some stability.
What worked for me was to block all made for adsense sites appearing in my ad blocks. If I see one, I'll add it to the list. That way I only see genuine advertisers. Over time, smartpricing has increased the value of my site as the clicks are converting for genuine advertisers and not scrapers etc.
GOOGLE DOES NOT monitor your page see how well it converts then determines how to use smart pricing. Google monitors convertion rates accross all sorts of sites, tries to figure out patterns, then based on those patterns it discovers tries to guess what type of pages convert better. When it looks at your page, it just sees what type of page it is, and according to its type Google decides how to use smart pricing with it regardless of if this specific page of yours has converted well or not.
This is exactly how smart pricing works, and the following quote from Google explains it:
We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
There is no mention of conversion tracking in this passage.
GOOGLE DOES NOT monitor your page see how well it converts then determines how to use smart pricing. Google monitors convertion rates accross all sorts of sites, tries to figure out patterns, then based on those patterns it discovers tries to guess what type of pages convert better. When it looks at your page, it just sees what type of page it is, and according to its type Google decides how to use smart pricing with it regardless of if this specific page of yours has converted well or not.
This is not a quote from Google, but an opinion. Google are not going to tell anyone exactly how smartpricing works, so all we *can* do is share experiences and second guess.
Although Google may well take all of the above factors into account when determining smartpricing, I'm going to disagree with the comment that conversion on your page has no bearing on smartpricing. I think the opposite is true.
A couple of months ago, I started blocking all made for adsense sites. I can't see how they can ultimately pay more than advertisers actually selling things - they are only there on the basis of ctr elsewhere on the network. The result of this is that my average click value is now SIX TIMES what it was when I started banning MFA sites.
I haven't changed the ad type, I haven't moved the ad, I haven't changed the page in any way, shape or form at all. What I am seeing is well targetted ads from advertisers selling goods and services, and I believe that as a result smartpricing has decided that my site is now a lot more valuable and has bumped up the cpc accordingly.
For the statement in the quote to be true, then banning scrapers etc would not be the reason that I now get six times more per click.
I believe that Google DO take conversions on your site into account. Of course we will never know, but I can't think why they wouldnt look at conversions on a particular site / page when determining pricing.
From the Adwords help pages:-
Google's smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results - such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups - we reduce the price you pay for that click.
