Escaping Smart Pricing

Can it be done?

[loner]

In the last couple years I've teetered on the brink of smart pricing. I've been loathe to increase inventory on one of my sites to avoid it. Recently I decided it was more about my site being what I wanted my site to be instead of guessing what fickle 'g' wants and added a considereable amount of pages. So, as I expected. I fell into a severe smart pricing mode.

Now I'm seeing this as a possible opportunity to reduce adsense page inventory and free it up for other advertisers. I'm wondering if this shift may/or has resulted in an, increase in ecpm and bring me out of this smart pricing gimmick.

[purplecape]

Adding pages by itself doesn't cause smart pricing to kick in.

Smart pricing is intended to give a discount to advertisers for clicks that aren't predicted to convert as well as some defined standard. So it's your traffic and your content that matter.

If you've got visitors who are seriously shopping for something in particular, they are more valuable than random surfers looking for jokes (for example).

And if a page reviews a particular product rather than tell a funny story that happens to mention that particular product, that page is more valuable.

Look at your site from the POV of the advertisers appearing there....

[signor_john]

Remember, too, that:

- AdSense has evolved over time, with changes like separate bidding for the "content network" and search, an unlimited domain filter, and (recently announced) better tools to help them see which sites are performing and which ones aren't. Changes to AdWords (such as "quality scoring" and pressure on click arbitrageurs) can also impact a publisher's AdSense earnings.

- Many advertisers are trimming their budgets in the current economic climate. (Pay-per-click advertising may not be taking as a big a hit as newspaper or network TV advertising are, but that doesn't mean AdSense publishers won't share some of the pain.)

In short, it's possible that your "severe smart pricing mode" has nothing to do with smart pricing per se.

[Green_Grass]

IMO , smart pricing is a cycle.. let the cycle run and wait for things to improve. I would give it a week before worrying and 3 weeks before panicking.

;-)

I have also experienced degrees of smart pricing..so the cycle can be complicated.

[netmeg]

I'm wondering... On the AdWords side, there are multiple types of quality score - there's the quality score for a keyword, and for an account, and probably for the landing page, and there are no doubt others we don't even know about. Maybe for the ad.

So then, why wouldn't there also be different types of smart pricing? Account level smart pricing - where every click gets discounted because in general your traffic is not considered of the highest quality, and maybe a per-click smart pricing - your traffic's generally good, but some anomaly occurs that makes Google think that particular click might not be useful - like if I get occasional Asian or European vistors on my Michigan-centric sites - or maybe even on a per site basis, if you have some sites that do really well and others not so much. Really, it makes some amount of sense if you think about it. All things are *never* equal. Maybe as soon as a click occurs, all kinds of cogs and wheels start churning to figure out what exactly to pay for *that* click at *that* moment.

I am starting to think that maybe that *every* click is evaluated for some kind of smart pricing at the time it occurs; nobody gets a free pass from it.

It might also explain some of the longer and longer delays we sometimes see waiting for stats to update.

It's just my theory, nobody else need share it.

[jimbeetle]

I am starting to think that maybe that *every* click is evaluated for some kind of smart pricing at the time it occurs; nobody gets a free pass from it.

That's kind of the way I've always thought of it. It isn't that a site or an account get "smartpriced," smartpricing *is* the pricing system.

[zett]

I am starting to think that maybe that *every* click is evaluated for some kind of smart pricing at the time it occurs; nobody gets a free pass from it.

Yep. I think so, too.

I strongly believe that the click-price is not known prior to the click. At that time just the maximum is known. The price for the click will be determined right AFTER the click. The value may range from 0 to maximum, depending on zillions of metrics (geolocation, click frequency of that user, time before the user shows up again elsewhere, etc etc).

That would also explain the extreme volatility of EPC.

Having said that, I still think there is an additional factor that I would call "publisher rating", a quality score for publishers. You may be assigned a lower rating, which will lead to significantly lower earnings.