Is Smart Pricing Account Wide or Site Specific

Does smart pricing hit accounts or sites

[newborn]

Guys I have realized that over the last few days, my main website has been getting extremely low paying clicks. However one website continues to get high paying clicks based on some days.

What I wanted to know if it is a case that I have not tweaked my Filter box well enough or I have been smart priced by just one site. It just seem weird.

Anyone have any thoughts?

[mobilemaverick]

I would take a logical guess at:

Definitely not account wide, that would be insane.

Probably not even site wide, not sure why it would?

Personally I believe it's page by page.

Maybe I'm wrong, I try to think logically about these things. Whether google uses logic or not is another thing I guess.

[radix]

google for jensense smart pricing

[europeforvisitors]

Back in 2005, a former moderator of this forum (who still writes about AdSense) once reported that, according to a Google AdSense Support rep, smart pricing was account-wide. But that was quite a while ago, and in any case, the rep could have been mistaken.

It would make sense for at smart pricing to have at least some account-wide effect, because that would help to discourage publishers from playing tricks that lowered conversions for advertisers. At the same time, one would expect different levels of smart pricing for different types of content on a site, in keeping with Google's examples of content that converts well ("a camera review") and content that doesn't ("a page of photo tips"). So who knows--maybe smart pricing has account-wide, site-specific, and page-specific components. We can only guess.

[newborn]

So guys what is the criteria for identifying smart pricing on a site or an account.

[europeforvisitors]

There are no definitive criteria, but a lot of people assume that smart pricing is at work when their EPC takes a sudden drop.

[BigDave]

So guys what is the criteria for identifying smart pricing on a site or an account.

A very good question that isn't asked enough, though I can't answer it. My guess is that smart pricing is rare on normal websites, but it's the favorite scapegoat whenever earnings drop.

[atreides9999]

If it were my system, (which it's not), I would smart-price by keyword, I can't imagine it's any other way.

For example, if your site was about photocopiers:
'photo' - would be priced down (to avoid photography ads)
'photocopier' - priced up.
'xerox', 'canon' - priced about how they actually perform.

The algo, would then choose which ads to show, so eventually your ads would be more targetted, and your earning could bounce back as a result.

For each keyword, I would assume its account wide unless your site's click rate is above a certain threshold, then I'd narrow it to site wide. For very high traffic sites I would do it by page.

There is not enough statistics to do it by page for smaller sites. So I imagine it all depends on the size of your account.

Secondly, knowing Google and their tricky algos, they'd compare the content on your site to similar sites, and take there performance stats, to choose ads for you.

So, in my opinion, as google keeps saying, if you have a good site smart-pricing shouldn't be too bad for you in the long run. Advertisers will convert due to targetted traffic from your site, and then increase their advertising budgets.