Can too much blending kill your earnings?

through smartpricing

[HuhuFruFru]

I have been using Adsense on my sites in the last months and found it very easy to maintain a high CTR, this can be done with perfect blending where the user can't see the difference between links which lead to pages within your site and links which are from Adsense.

Question is: can it ruin your earnings through smartpricing? I have analyzed Earnings per Click for the last months and they have gone down from (main average) 0.12 cents to 0.11 cents.

Now I'm afraid that this trend could go on further.

I would be very interested in experiences: those who use *very aggressively* blending: has it hurt your earnings (lower EPC?) Or has EPC stayed the same?

[Pengi]

I don't know about smart pricing - I'm convinced that get the blame for a lot or performance changes that are just natural variation.

Personnally, I would be very wary of any attempts to disguise Ads too much. It is a clear theme of Googles TOS that there should be no deception or misleading of visitors. This is why all the adblocks make it clear that they are ads.

If you did mislead visitors into clicking on an Ad they though was a link, I would expect a very poor response when they arrive at an unexected site change - if you are going to get hit by smart pricing, I belive this would be one of the ways to do it.

[edited by: Pengi at 11:02 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2006]

[John Carpenter]

Question is: can it ruin your earnings through smartpricing?

Yes, it definitely can (that's one of the main purposes of Smart Pricing).

from (main average) 0.12 cents to 0.11 cents.

This is not a very significant difference. Natural AdSense fluctuations typically bring much bigger differences.

[sailorjwd]

I think lower EPC can be from something more simple than smart pricing.

If you have high CTR and are getting a significant number of visitors (and therefore clicks) you are bound to wear out one or more advertiser's budgets. I see this on my site.

In the morning I'll often see high x.xx clicks or even xx.xx clicks. Rarely do these continue to show up later in the day. i'm sure I've worn out the budget of some advertisers. If you lose a couple of advertisers then bid competition can drop quickly and significantly.. thus lower EPC.