AdSense Smart Pricing: What It Is And How To Overcome It
Some of you may have heard discussions about AdSense smart pricing. Smart pricing defines the situation in which, due to the low CTR recorded in your AdSense account, you get served on your sites only low cost ads, thus diminishing your earnings. This seems to affect your whole AdSense account, so all your websites will get smartpriced, not just the one which triggered smart pricing.
Although you won’t find any reference in the Google AdSense guide, the phenomenon has been experienced by many bloggers, including myself.
How did I notice that? Well, I don’t post on daily basis on my personal blog, and at a point I’ve noticed that my AdSense earnings were bigger in the days when I didn’t publish anything. After a few tests, I came up with the following conclusions:
- Each time one of my articles got a lot of traffic from social networks (thus recording a decrease in the AdSense CTR, as it is known that social networking traffic has a poor conversion rate), my AdSense CPC went down.
- When I didn’t submit my posts to social media for a longer period of time (like one week or so), despite the fact that my traffic was lower, the AdSense earnings were higher (both CTR and CPC went up).
How To Overcome AdSense Smart Pricing
The solution is simple, but it requires tracking AdSense ad units performance at URL level:
- Define an URL channel for every page you display AdSense on. By page, I also mean single posts, not only pages, as defined in the Wordpress system.
- If you notice that on some URLs you get a very small CTR (let’s say less than 2%), remove the ads from that URL. Sometimes, less is more.
- If you see that one of your posts gets on the front page of Digg, or on the Buzz page of StumbleUpon, or on any other social site’s front page, and you see a lot of traffic coming from there, remove the ads from that post for the next few days.
- Use Shylock AdSense plugin for Wordpress (if you use anything else, sorry, I can’t give you an alternative), but not the original one: check out this hacked version of Shylock AdSense, which makes your ads to be displayed only to people coming to your website from search engines. Take good care when you do these changes to your blog’s code, and always have a backup done immediately before attempting such interventions.
Moreover, don’t believe anybody who says things that you cannot find in the official guides of programs like AdSense. Don’t even believe these words of mine. Do your own tests, on your own websites, because this would be the most valuable learning of all. If your tests confirm my words, then go ahead and take some measures. If they don’t, why should you bother with all this tweaking, since the benefit for you would be close to zero? What worked for me, may not work for you. But only proper testing can reveal that.
Other articles in How To Start Making Money With Adsense series:
- How To Start Making Money With AdSense - A Basic Guide For Beginners
- Got Accepted Into AdSense. How To Setup Ads On My Blog.
- AdSense Channels Tracking And Reporting: Case Study
- AdSense Guide: How To Play With Ad Colors
More articles will be published, and links to these articles will be added here as we advance with our AdSense Guide For Beginners series. Make sure you don’t miss them. Subscribe to our feed.
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[…] Smartpricing: What It Is And How To Overcome It. […]
[…] Smartpricing: What It Is And How To Overcome It. […]
It’s funny but traffic generating things like stumble, Digg, and Entrecard are definetly bad for click through rates. I first found out about smart pricing from Vic and Griz. And then I realized it had happened to me. Great post your blog is really informative.
Thank you, Emma. Yes, all these are bad for CTRs, but still the traffic from there is welcome. All we have to do is take care not to display the ads those days when we get a lot of social media traffic to our pages.
StumbleUpon and Digg members mostly blogger just like us..even you get horrible traffic from these site but less on click because they know what the google adsense is..
Bent’s last blog post..How To Upload And Installing Plugins For Wordpress.
Having spotted this on my account yet.
But i’ll start looking in to it..
But actually it makes a bit sence, as we all make Google wander thru our pages. Let Google stake-out our visitors with Analytics, why shouldnt they control or monitor our CTR ?
With the power Google has on the internet, its not that far off, calling Big Brother.
blogsmarter.dk has only been on the internet, for about 6 month now. Running with an average of 3 visits a day. My Adsense earnings aren’t that big yet, but im working on it… And thanks to you Simonne, for enligthing me on this “problem”.
Regards Jacob
Learn to blog smarter
Jacob’s last blog post..Multiple personalities
You are welcome, Jacob. Keep on testing, maybe you can improve the figures. We wish you good luck.
[…] Pinoy Dreamer wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Some of you may have heard discussions about AdSense smart pricing. Smart pricing defines the situation in which, due to the low CTR recorded in your AdSense account, you get served on your sites only low cost ads, thus diminishing your earnings. This seems to affect your whole AdSense account, so all your websites will get smartpriced, not just the one which triggered smart pricing. Although you won’t find any reference in the Google AdSense guide, the phenomenon has been experienced by many […]
Those are very wise and sage updated advice on how to do the and avoid the adsense money loser and replace them with the adsense money maker and therefore make you rich and you do the math its just common cents the advice you;ve give is a good resource.
Thank you, I’m glad you found this useful.
traffic can be good sometimes but i think google doesnt want us to earn too much
azwanhadzree’s last blog post..Setting Up Your Own WordPress Blog : The Setting Up
Actually they want us to make money, because the more we make, the bigger their profit is. However, it’s up to us to discover how to get maximum efficiency for a given effort
u are right on that. i’m actually trying your tips but not testing on all pages, only on certain one. hope it works.
azwanhadzree’s last blog post..Siu Kang Jiu
Good luck with your testing, but please don’t share your CTR anymore, because it is against the ToS and you might get suspended. The only figure which you are allowed to share is the income.
Thanks… this is useful and interesting. I’m definitely going to check it out.
shirley’s last blog post..Here’s something cute!
We thank you, Shirley, for stopping by. I hope this tip will help you improve your earnings online.
[…] Smartpricing: What It Is And How To Overcome It. […]
After reading far too many articles about smart pricing, I finally went and wrote filter that won’t show Google Ads to visitors from Entrecard or sitehoppin. At least so far I haven’t seen any negative effect on my income due to this change. If anything, it has made my average click price go higher.
Then again ads on my blogs get less than 50 clicks a day, so our sample is too small for any real statistic analysis.
Juha Ylitalo’s last blog post..Keilaniemi (week 08/08)
Thank you for your comment. Yes, your sample may be too small, but if your results will be consistent over a longer period of time, then you’ll know you were right by applying that filter.