just came across smart pricing... low CTR reduces adsense cut to 10%? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Guess we always have to read the fine print here. Adsense is a nice side income, but honestly, if I could replace it with some regular direct ad, I think I would do it in a heartbeat.

I limit it to two so that people don't become blind too them

KNS Financial said:

I guess it really makes sense for me to only show ads to my search engine traffic. The problem with that is that I use a cache plugin, so I'm not sure my adsense targeting plugins are working.

 

 

You'll need to have a plugin that works specifically with caching enabled. I know that Ozh's "Who Sees Ads" doesn't and it will display whatever was cached for all visitors. If you do a search for it though I think there are some guys out there that have implemented "tricks" to work around this! 

Post edited 11:02 am – April 15, 2011 by JT_McGee

You won't be getting smartpriced, trust me.

The people who get smartpriced get smartpriced because their traffic is garbage traffic without IP geo-identifiers, proxy traffic, or for low-paying, unprofitable sites for gossip news or Myspace profiles.  I wouldn't worry about it one bit.

I would, however, caution people on using the same Adsense account across many different niches.  An Adsense account probably shouldn't be used for both financial sites and gossip sites, since it is likely that your smartpricing will drag down the value of your finance clicks, which should be worth 10…20…30? times what gossip traffic is worth.

@LaTisha

Yes, you are able to do that, but it doesn't have anything to do with smartpricing.  The problem ultimtely results from the fact that "entertainment" traffic usually doesn't convert well, and a universal discount is applied to the account to price in the fact that it doesn't convert.  Setting up individual ad blocks will not protect against smartpricing.

eCPM and CTR are going to be different.  Smart pricing does not directly affect your CPM and CTR.

When Google smartprices, they basically say "X account is getting paid too much in comparison to the quality of the traffic" then they "smartprice" the whole account by reducing revenue per click, based on their judgment of your traffic quality from the ENTIRE account.  Thus, if your almost gossip site provided low quality traffic, then your whole account would be affected, decreasing revenues across the board.  You wouldn't be able to tell from the differences in CTR/CPM, as they would be affected equally in terms of percentage–I should have been more clear in this point above.

LLCing individually avoids the problem of having one account per payee name.  Multiple accounts are commonplace with people who create many, many niche sites, as it saves them from losing revenue on one site due to quality issues with another. I don't really care to debate it; the strategy can be found pretty much everywhere, and been popularized after Google's war against Made For Adsense (MFA) sites started a few years ago.