Forum Moderators: martinibuster
During the last three months I didn't make any dramatic changes in the content of my website. And there wasn't either any dramatic change in the traffic I get or CTR.
Lately I started turning off AdSense ads on pages that are performing poorly in long-term (really low EPC - about 0.02). At the end only high performing pages remained.
And guess what has happened. The pages that were performing very well in long-term started to fall really quickly and now I get EPC 0.02 for a page that had 0.09!
That implies that Smart-Pricing is not only counted on the basis of the conversion rate or type of content. There must be something more behind it! It seems to me as if Google sets fixed EPC and eCPM for certain web and calls it "Smart Pricing".
Can anybody help me to break the Smart Pricing curse?
Summary
=======
- only one website under AdSense account
- the web site is 1 year old
- no dramatic changes in the content or structure of the website
- no dramatic changes in CTR and traffic
- no dramatic changes in SERP
No, Google cannot measure conversion, if they did, they would have done better with their Cost Per Action (CPA/Referrals2.0) program, it is not doing well because among other reasons, Google can only calculate their perception of the probability of your site conversion let's coin that POT POY SC :-)
See if your site is being CPM targeted by what is probably a low paying advertiser:
a) Look in your AdSense targeting report and see how many CPM impressions and how much it made you in the past 4 months, if your drop coincides with a rise in CPM impressions served, consider contacting support and asking them to turn it off.
b) (A bit Risky) Browse through your pages and see if you can fish out a low paying niche advertiser like for example ring tones, forums, dating .. or an MFA site. If your website is a ring tone or one of the other two or a combination of all three!, then you just got what others who own sites like yours are said to be making anyway, if not, experiment with blocking few of them, hold your breath for a week or two and see if it worked.
c) Check targeting, if ads on your site are totally unrelated, then there's your problem, look into what caused this, even if you changed nothing, a change in algo can see the same page under new light, work on your content and see if you can bring targeting back.
As for the curse, there are several 'AdSense Herbal Remedies', Google it ;-)
Keep in mind, too, SP algos could change at any time. You have to imagine just as they adjust their SE algo, they look to do the same with their SP algo as well.
I usually guess based on logic. With respect to conversion rate, yes, it is likely a very high CTR is unnatural and cannot be justified; therefore it is not worthy of top dollar.
But that's only one component of the SP algo, presumably. Google probably also considers how many advertisers blacklist you (if you have a v. high CTR) and how many advertisers site-target you (if you have site-targeting on).
Imagine in reverse the Quality Score that AdWords advertisers get for their landing pages. If they have a low score, I think they have to pay more. If our "landing pages" with Adsense ads have a low score, we should expect to earn less (aka Smart Pricing).
It is also possible that Google rates similar sites with Adsense the same way it does for SERPs. So if your competition in your industry/sector has better landing pages, or new sites come along with better quality landing pages, your potential to be "smartpriced" increases.
BTW, I don't think smartpricing is black and white. I see it in shades of gray. Like a scale that can go up or down any week. Who says you can only be smartpriced once? Or that the smartpricing is never undone?
Anyway, again, there's so much guesswork in it--even for experts--one really can't spend too much time worrying about it. Just try to give good opportunities to advertisers and good value to website visitors. Golden Rule it to the big money!
p/g
First of all - I checked AdSense reports and found out that only contextual ads were displayed on my website.
Unfortunately none of your posts provides any reasonable explanation for the fall of eCPM and EPC of the long-term high performing pages. After I removed AdSense from poorly performing pages the eCPM and EPC stared to fall and as a result high performing pages became low performing pages. The fall happened within 3 days! It's obvious that conversion rate of that pages couldn't change so quickly!
So eCPM and average EPC before "optimization" is almost equal to eCPM and average EPC after "optimization".
Does anybody has explanation for that?
...and now I get EPC 0.02 for a page that had 0.09! ...the web site is 1 year old
Over long periods of time, don't be surprised if a chart of your EPC looks like a roller coaster.
Although it's difficult, the best approach is to spend your time working on your site to be preparred to take advantage of the next peak instead of fretting over the current valley.
FarmBoy
