Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We must emphasise that CTR is not a very important metric from the point of view of SmartPricing. You could have a 100% CTR with 0% conversions in an industry where conversions normally run above 10%. And that will do you no good.
It's the conversions as reported by advertisers that plays a major part in SmartPricing. So, if conversion is the most important component of SmartPricing - and therefore earnings - how come that this is the one metric that is not disclosed to us? If you don't know which sites/pages/channels are underperforming for the advertiser you can't improve their performance or usefulness to advertisers.
For a long time Adsense was the only game in town so when Google took the completely preposterous stand of saying they'll discount our EPC by er, pretty much how much they want, hardly anyone batted an eyelid; they had no choice. So Google implemented SmartPricing, there were howls of protests and Earnings-have-Dropped threads, and Google makes a lot more money from Adsense according to their latest financial statements. (We can't tell for sure whether there is direct link between SmartPricing and the extra profits).
Adsense competitors are promising a fair payout and guaranteeing percentages (Chitika guarantees publishers 60%. No discouting that by some unknown, secretive, back-room shenanigans. 60% flat, no exceptions). If others can do it why can't Google? Was SmartPricing a band-aid over the fault lines caused by Google's allowing the SERPS to be overrun with scrapers? If it wasn't for the scraper sites would Google have introduced SmartPricing at all?
Isn't SmartPricing open to a lot of bias? Yes, we all trust Google but any large system can make a lot of mistakes. The less you tell people about what the deal is the less likely any of your mistakes will come to light. But, aren't publishers the ultimates losers? I've always argued that we should be fair to advertisers but it's looking increasingly like Google doesn't see any need to be fair to publishers or to be seen to be fair. Isn't that dangerous in a market that's getting very competitive?
Personally, I've replaced a lot of Adsense ads with Chitika ones and they are paying far more than Adsense did. EPC is higher, eCPM is higher. Is Google going to let publishers experiment with competitor products and drift away when they find the difference? Or do you think Google will get a bit more transparent, modify (or scrap) SmartPricing, or replace it with something that makes sense?
The Google called me thread exposes some serious flaws with SmartPricing
Only if you believe what a perfect stranger has to say about the inner workings of adsense based on an alleged phone call with Google.
It's scary when third party hearsay becomes facts in a matter of days.
:(
Throw in some extras like direct marketing, or even affiliate sales and you can become very well rounded.
smart pricing has to exist to keep the system operating
Advertising, text link and otherwise existed long before Google Adsense, and it worked quite well. The concept of smart pricing is a good one - the problem is it simply cannot work properly the way the system is currently set up. That's why so many good publishers are switching to YPN which hurts AdWords advertisers and Google more than the publishers themselves in the long run.
