Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Opinions?
Is smart pricing calculated by page, site, or account?
It could be all three. Only Google knows. Mind you, it's possible to make an argument for any of the three approaches (or a combination of multiple factors).
Reminder to self: get those smaller sites further developed - gold mines are lurking inside them.
For instance, let's say you have a site in adsense that performs very well. You add a site on another topic. The 2nd site has quality content, good traffic, high pagerank, and is definitely relevant to it's chosen topic...yet the ctr is fairly low (perhaps because the content is high quality and very compelling).
Would it make sense for google to penalize the earnings potential of the first site simply because the second site is not a good earner. It makes more sense to handle the urls separately. To apply smart pricing to an account overall would be a disincentive to adding more sites to an adsense account. Because you could shoot yourself in the foot.
Consider the same scenario, but in reverse: you have a high quality site in adsense that doesn't earn very well. You add a second site that has high quality content, is very relevant to the topic, gets a lot of clicks, and has a high ctr. The second site performs better. Would the 2nd site that's added to the adsense account (which performs better for advertisers) cause the first site to get better treatment under smartpricing? I don't think so.
I'm not saying that google doesn't apply smartpricing to an account overall. I just don't see how it would make sense.
I have the same thought. Only where to find the time.
Mind you, it's possible to make an argument for any of the three approaches (or a combination of multiple factors).
I think it would be a very weak case to make it according to account. Sites should be priced differently as there is often no connection between them. The traffic and traffic sources are different.
Personally, I think it should be done on a page by page basis. But the argument for doing it sitewide is that Google cannot collect enough statistics to smart price each page. And since the visitors are likely to be the same on different parts of the site, in theory, the stats from one part should be an indicator of the other part. I don't like site-wide smartpricing because we get this ridiculous result that adding adsense to more pages can actually decrease total revenue.
If I had my way, smart pricing should be done on a per page basis for pages with enough impressions to do statistically significant analysis. Only when this is not met should site-wide factors play a part as a best 'second guess'. But alas, I don't have my way, nor is Google going to tell us their way, which really hurts my chances of optimizing my income from the ads.
This question, incidentally, nags me more than any other because it effects important development decisions. I really wish Google would clarify smartpricing (in general terms).
Happily, it seems that the new CPM campaigns are making smartpricing less of an issue since I don't believe those campaigns are 'smartpriced'. Since they have started running on my site, effective EPM have been rising to pre April 2004 levels. :>
An application of smartpricing based on page or site seems logical. But what would be the rationale for applying this to an account?
Since we have no idea how Google's smart-pricing formula works, why waste time on debating hypothetical scenarios?
Lol. That same argument renders nearly every discussion in nearly every forum at webmasterworld a similar waste of time. Truth is, we're all just bumping around in the dark. Some of us have bigger flashlights of course. (unfortunately, mine is equivalent to a keyring AA battery light)
It's just nice to get other brains working on a question and see the various inputs, sort of like parallel processing.
"why are the stats not updating?"
"Yureka, my epc is up"
"Curses, my epc is down"
"Help, my account has been terminated" (first time poster)
Of course I could be wrong, 50% wrong, or ... completely confused, which would be normal.
Since we have no idea how Google's smart-pricing formula works, why waste time on debating hypothetical scenarios?
Because if enough webmasters pipe up, we may have enough of a stat or trend to reverse engineer the smartpricing algo.
Just suppose, twenty webmasters came on and said, "As soon as I added a new site, my long established channels decreased in EPC." We could reasonably conclude that smartpricing effects the whole account.
Of course with all of these threads (of the reverse engineering kind), I have yet to come to any conclusions as one webmaster's experience always seems to be contradicted by the next. So maybe you are right: it's too complicated to reverse engineer so it's a waste of time. But OTOH it's impossible to know if our efforts are in vain until we make them.
Go figure!
I think it would be a very weak case to make it according to account.
Okay, since people really want to discuss this, I'll give my devil's-advocate reason why it would make sense to determine smart pricing by account in cases where Google thinks it's appropriate to do so.
First, we have to look at what Google's intent would be if it used "by account" as a factor. The intent would obviously be to protect advertisers while discouraging the proliferation of low-quality sites.
Second, logic suggests that Google would use statistical probability (based on its huge collection of data) to determine smart-pricing adjustments by account. In other words, if Bud Scraper has 100,000 crappy script-generated pages that don't convert for advertisers, Google can assume (with a very high probability of being correct) that any new pages added to Bud Scraper's account are likely to perform poorly for advertisers.
Third, common sense implies that Google wouldn't invoke such automatic reductions in EPC lightly, because the intent wouldn't be to take revenue from the person with a decently-converting site about widgets who decides to put AdSense ads on his 100-page personal site about canine history or the stylistic peculiarities of James Joyce. More likely, there would be a threshold or trigger point for account-based "smart pricing" adjustments, and that the threshold would be crossed only when adequate data was available to support an automatic account-wide increase in the "smart pricing" discount for advertisers.
Basically when Bud Scraper's true value has become irrefutable, as in "enough pages and enough clicks to be worth keeping around, yet worthless enough to have his payouts appropriately devalued".
