Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In that case, a good content site could still fall foul of Smart Pricing at the primary entry pages, especially if the ad positioning is good, because it exhibits some MFA characteristics. This is because casual surfers may come to the site, then exit immediately through an ad, but not do any 'conversion' actions at the advertiser's site, for the very reason that they are 'casual surfers'. The lack of conversion then brings the Smart Price down.
Therefore, says my little brain working overtime, a better strategy for a content site might be to redesign the primary entry page(s) so that casual surfers exit without clicking on any ads, but real prospects stay at the site, explore, and ultimately exit the site via an ad that genuinely interests them. This will reduce overall CTR, but significantly increase the EPC Smart Price because the content site is doing some pre-qualification of prospects before sending them to the Advertiser.
Does this make sense? Has anyone taken the bold step of redesigning their primary entry pages to both improve site stickiness and encourage casual surfers to exit without clicking on an ad?
Does this make sense?
To put it in short, your strategy works.
Thanks for sharing your experience on this - very interesting.
Are your two sites held in the same Adsense account? I thought Smart Pricing was supposed to apply across an entire account, which would suggest removing adsense from your second site would result in a further increase in EPC at the first?
The operative word here is "part"
>exhibits some MFA characteristics
Again the word to look for here is "some"
So I would not worry too much.
Like moftary I found AdSense on my home pages too cheap in terms of looks and income too! But keep in mind that for me as well as many of you, our main entry page(s) is not necessarily the home page.
Our home page is well down the rankings as an entry page - 6th, in fact, generating only 4% of visitors. The main entry page is a very low earner and one of those sites where, earlier this week, I removed all the ads.
However, the second most popular entry point is a high earner - generating nearly 20% of our entire revenue. Yesterday, I wasn't brave enough to remove the ads completely, but I've moved them out of the hotzone and replaced them with links to closely related pages.
My concern, before starting this thread and getting some reassurance, was that income might collapse. Today, however, although revenue from this page has fallen through the floor - down to only 1/10th of what it would normally be at this time of day, total revenue for the rest of the site is well up. I suspect this is because visitors are starting to explore our content more - though I need to do some log file analysis to confirm that.
The most important thing is that the collapse in earnings I feared has not materialised, and at the moment earnings appear to be moving in the upward direction. However, I recognise that it is very early days and I need to review some stats after a decent length of time.
I must admit that in the last few days I've moved from not understanding Smart Pricing to beginning to like it. It seems to reward publishers who can:
On mine, I put an Adlinks block on my home page, which is also a big entry point, in June. It immediately became a big earner and earnings for the rest of the site were NOT affected. I think what was happening is that a sizable portion of the people coming to the home page find that it's not exactly what they were searching for. Some of them find what they wanted in the AdLinks block. The ones who DO find that my site is what they wanted keep going into the site....
Moftary's experience illustrates that Smart Pricing isn't the only thing that can cause EPC to go up and down. The visitors and the ads are very different between the low-EPC and the high-EPC sites, and those differences have more of an impact on earnings, in this case, than the impact of Smart Pricing account-wide....
It's been said in this forum, and the penny has finally dropped in my mind, that Smartpricing is part of Google's anti-MFA strategy. Pages that just act as conduits for web surfers will earn much less than pages that attract and effectively pre-qualify potential purchasers for advertisers.
Try it and let us know. But not everyone agrees that smart pricing is part of Google's anti-MFA strategy (except in theory or for public consumption).
What worked for me was putting a vertical adlinks block upper left on my home page and integrating it into the layout. See the site in my profile. Crude design, I know, but it works for my visitors.
I will when I've got a decent run of stats. My key indicator of site performance is revenue per visitor, which is fairly consistent, doesn't change so much with traffic, and is a good indicator of site performance.
However, I've just discovered that my ISP's webstats haven't been working properly for the last three days - I can't tell how many visitors I've had, so the last 3 days are wasted from a statistical point of view. Frustrating.
Hunderdown, I've tried the type of adlink placement you've suggested, and will report back on how that has affected EPC when SmartPrice next updates.
The only thing that makes me think that smartpricing is per channel is that I thought google is smart enough to do that. But a recent experience makes me "feel" the opposite.
As for the adlinks issue, I am surprized that I never tried them so far!
