Use AdSense Sparingly to Avoid Smart Pricing

Hello Caroline , maybe it is good to know that Google allows you to “open Adsense in a new window” !!! In order to setup you need to use “Google Ad manager” , it is still in Beta. I tried it out but for the moment it is not working correctly. Dont know what I’ve been doing wrong.
But another plus from this “Google Ad manager” is that one can use it as a tool to sell your advertising space. But as far as I am concerned the “open Adsense in a new window” is worth to follow up, and it is allowed by Google!

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Interesting, I never really understood much about smart pricing. In fact, I’d nearly given up on Adsense until I tried some new strategies. I’ll have to check into my low CTR sites and see if that helps. I have noticed an increase in click payouts on one of my niche sites, but it isn’t anything great. Maybe my smaller sites are dragging me down.

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I have never heard of smart pricing before! 3% seems to be quite high CTR as well. Also if this is true then what is Google doing with the money they should be passing on to you? Are the advertisers paying less money for the click?

Doesn’t seem to add up to me!

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I hardly use AdSense at all…I agree with you that there are usually far more profitable things to do with your traffic.

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Thanks for this. I’m still very naive with Adsense. I never knew about smart pricing before. I have 3 niche sites which are giving me good click value. However, recently, the dollar per click are surprisingly low and sometimes they are high. Maybe smart pricing could be the reason. i need to check back all my sites which have adsense inside them. Need to get a steady traffic before incorporating adsense into them. Normally, as soon as i set up a site, i’ll put adsense….

Is there any intensive tutorial on adsense, and something about smart pricing and other things that me and other people don’t know…?

If there is then it will be a great help.

@GuyH, that is certainly worth looking into but I doubt it is going to help battle the smart pricing problem.

@Clog, the way it works is that Google will pay the highest commissions to those sites that generate the highest CTR. In turn it also puts the highest converting ads on the best sites but it also charges the advertiser highly for those ads. Going the other way, the poorer performing sites get the poorer performing ads and those generally don’t cost as much to the advertiser. Its a good system really because the advertiser pays highly for well converting ads placed on well converting sites and the publisher gets well paid as well.

@Cyza, don’t look at inidividual clicks as these will vary – check the average over time. Different ads produce different click values so the odd click here and there is not enough of an indicator that something has changed with your account. I don’t know of any reliable AdSense tutorials, most of the mainstream ones (such as Joel Comm’s) are heavily criticised by those that actually make money with it.

Do you know if you get put in and out of Smartpricing? I only get Adsense revenue when interesting adverts are appearing on my site. I get nothing most of the time. But I have noticed that I seem to have periods when I get about 15 cents per click and periods when I get about a dollar. I find it hard to believe that there is that much variation in the value of the clicks to the advertiser in my niche.

It is unfortunate the Google doesn’t allow you to segregate your account by site so that one bad site can’t pull down your whole account. Even from Google’s point of view, that would make more sense.

Nothing original to write anymore I guess. This has been discussed in length on thousands of blogs for many many months prior to this.

All you do Caroline is read other blogs and regurgitate what you read. Just another “how to make money” blog by someone who isnt making much money. How in the world can you be writing anything about adsence when you make $23.00 a month from it? Time to reevaluate where you are taking this blog because it is surely not to new hights.

Ok, start bashing me now

Interesting, I would love to know how this whole google sheme works, I mean it’s obvious that when you pick a niche where people pay up to 5$ per click or something and you yourself offer just 2$ you have to be at other places than the guys paying 5$, or am I mistaken? That would be adwords, but adsense and adwords connected so I would be interested how this actually works.

I hadn’t really made the connection between Adsense and search traffic, but a very useful point and very logical now you mention it. A useful rule of thumb.

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Beth – Not bashing you really, and I’m not some blinded Caroline fan (This is my first comment), yet it seems illogical for her to make posts on ‘old’ topics.

Just because you are aware of this, doesn’t mean the rest of us are. Supposing I had only recently started online, this might in fact be the first I heard of it.. as I wouldn’t necessarily have had read a blog post (like you) that was posted “many many months prior to this.”

I don’t think its the hard core bloggers that are clicking on adsense. I never really click on them even in my google searches. But I do know a lot of people who do.

I also agree that overdoing it with the adsense is annoying. I hate the sites that put them right under the post title or anywhere that requires scrolling directly past them to get to the content. Sure put it in there but not in a way that takes up the whole page.

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I think it is smart that you do not use ads sense on this blog. Like you said, you might as well have people click to your own products so you can make money off of them possibly. I think blogs like yours are more into having a sticky blog then people leaving your blog. You want people to stay as long as possible so that you can possibly turn them into a religious reader or subscribers.

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@Caroline: That makes a lot more sense! Thank you ;0

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I heard about this “Smart Pricing” technique that Google uses just a month ago, but none of us really knows if it’s true or not. A lot of conclusions come from assumptions just like how StumbleUpon’s traffic is. Until they show that it is in fact true, we really don’t know what they do. lol. I also get low CTRs for my sites, but for some reason, I got $4 this one particular day. It’s just confusing at times.

-Mike

@Colin, I don’t know how often the smart pricing algorithm is run but from what I understand from other people, it’s pretty quick. Since writing this post, I took my ads off all my sites that were performing poorly and yesterday I got a click for over $1.00 on a crappy site that only usually gets $0.20 clicks so thats encouraging.

@Carrie, well I can see their reasons. If they allowed people to do that it would encourage people to have spammy sites with no concern for relevancy.

@Beth, as I said in my last response to a similar comment from you, the content of this blog is the relaying of my own personal experiences with what I do online. I’ll often do things that have been done many times before, and I’m sure I’ll have similar experiences to others that have done the same thing before but that’s all you’re ever going to see on this blog as this is its purpose. In case you hadn’t noticed, this blog is not entitled “Adsense Secrets blog”, it’s called “Caroline Middlebrook” so if you are not interested in hearing about my own personal experiences which you are obviously not, you will continue to be frustrated with my content.

@Sven, the relationship between adwords and adsense is that AdWords is what the people buying the ads use, and AdSense is what people displaying the ads on their sites use. Google runs both systems and takes an undisclosed slice of the money on both sides.

@Franklin, yeah blogs like mine simply don’t do well with AdSense. Makes a change to find somebody who agrees with me on that point!

@Mike, oh its real. It is there to prevent spam sites. There are some people who run automated systems for creating thousands of sites using purely scraped content and have adsense plastered all over it. The advertisers do not get a good response so Google smart prices those accounts to discourage the practice and try to encourage people to place relevant content that will result in better CTR’s for both the publisher and the advertiser.

Hi Caroline – Thanks for the heads up. The rate I’ve been getting from Adsense over the last few days right across my account is pitiful. It sounds like I’m being smart priced too.

Sometimes I feel like removing the whole lot and replacing it with anything. I’m betting dogfood, or something else completely unrelated to my sites would make me more cash than Adsense right now.

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@Cath, try removing it from one site at a time, starting with the one that shows the lowest CTR over say the last 7 days and see what happens to the remaining ones. If it still doesn’t improve then it may be time to look at other things that could be affecting it.

Good information here in a nutshell. I had heard of Smart Pricing but had not yet done the research. My CTR is about 6% overall so I think I’m in a good zone, but I sure would have been mad to see my revenues fall as I add more blogs.

I wanted to make one comment about Hubpages. You did the right thing in your case. On the other hand, I have Hubs that do make some money and have decent CTR with targeted keywords. Because Hubpages does keep a portion of the Adsense income, this is not a primary income strategy, but if you are doing them anyway, they can help–one would have to judge their own. And it’s not a bad start for complete newbies. My two cents.

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I never knew about Smart Pricing, but it makes sense. Relevancy is everything to Google, and they’re trying to weed out the slapped-up Adsense sites, I guess.

I don’t use Adsense on my blog. I just didn’t think it was worth it, especially when I’m trying to build my credibility as a straight-shooter.

Great post, with lots of valuable information. Thanks!

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HAHAHA!
You have No idea what you just said do you???

Why dont you learn how to use adsense before you start giving advice!!!

Your just a wannabe!

Thanks a lot Caroline!!!

I doubt my account has been smart priced and to remove smart pricing from my account, I am going to follow your second last line in this post, and that is..

“Therefore my new approach is not to put AdSense on a site until it starts to generate a reasonably steady stream of traffic – around 25 visitors a day”.

Hope this works for me. Feel free to visit my blog Miss Techs if you have some spare time and suggest me something.

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Caroline –

This post was obviously started many months ago, and I see the conversation has long died, but I could not help but respond to it, for what it’s worth, and specifically, to Beth’s comment about you regurgitating old news because you have run out of things to say.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, and thank goodness for the Internet that we all have the freedom to express ourselves. One has to assume that Beth is perhaps so savvy about blogging that she knows all there is, or she has read so many “how-to” blogging articles that there is simply nothing left for her to learn, and she assumes we’re all in the same boat. Good for her. I wish I could say the same for me!

But I am not Beth. I consider myself to be VERY savvy when it comes to many aspects of my personal and daily life. I’m proud of the skills I do have, and always seeking to improve them.

But a wizard at one thing (or even a few things) doesn’t mean you automatically know all there is to know about all things technical. I’m a data kinda gal – I can manipulate data in ways you never could imagine, extracting it and rearranging it to tell you things you didn’t even know you could ask of it. I can help anyone do things faster. But don’t ask me to make it look pretty.

I hate graphics, and I hate anything having to do with designing something in a graphics-based format. I also hate anything to do with Web design. It’s just not my cup of tea. And my brain knows I hate it, so it tries to block me in every way it can to hinder my learning efforts when I am confronted with graphics-based and/or Web-based applications.

Doing my own website was traumatic enough. It took me six years to get the courage to do it, and I did it all in one day, and haven’t touched it since – that was three years ago. I don’t want to go back there!

Now, after many years of pondering about it, I am finally ready to take the plunge and create a blog. In fact, I NEED to create a blog. RIGHT NOW. YESTERDAY. So a few weeks ago, I started casually searching around in my spare time, trying to get a feel for where to start and how to get it all done.

After weeks of Googling and reading, I am exhausted and exasperated. I know a lot more than I did before I started, but I’m also more confused than when I started, and no more ready to launch my blog today than I was three weeks ago, before doing the first Google search.

There are many questions I still need answers to, and they fall into several different categories. But one of the first questions I needed to tackle was how to physically get the whole thing going, from the design point of things, and how to arrange it. The blog lingo was completely foreign to me.

I found lots of sites that offered to sell ebooks with tutorials on how to make money blogging, or how to get started with blogging, and a scattering of articles. But I didn’t want to have to pay money just to get off the ground. I figured I would investigate ways to fine-tune it after I got it set up, and if I found a book that I felt would address that, then I would buy it. But not just to post the first thing!

I also found lots of great forums where you can post questions about blogging. But I have so MANY questions, I would be posting for a week just to get them all answered, and that is a lot of conversational material to keep up with at a time when I’m very busy. I feared I would leave all the people who might generously jump in to help me hanging, waiting for a response. Or it might trigger even more questions.

Then I stumbled upon Caroline’s site. After spending time that I didn’t really have watching her videos on YouTube, I now feel I at least have a grasp of the technical design aspect of setting up my blog, so that’s one major thing I have accomplished that I thought would take me at least another week.

And I’ve also benefited from all of the articles and discussion on the site about many other aspects of blogging that Caroline has covered that I wasn’t even remotely aware of but I realize now are very important.

Yes, there are a bazillion sites that cover blogging how-to’s out there, and many of them are selling books that promise to help you set up a blog and/or making money from it. Perhaps if I had stumbled upon one of them, and they were equally informative, I would be singing their praises at this moment, and that is fine. It’s a big world, and there is plenty of room for everyone to hang out their shingle, and if they’re all selling the same mouse trap, so be it. There are plenty of buyers to go around!

I don’t really care if Caroline’s information is regurgitated, as Beth claims it is, although I don’t get the feel that it is regurgitated at all. But perhaps Beth feels like it is simply because so many other people are saying the same thing, and there are only so many ways to say it. So be it.

It’s the one that was at the top of the hit list when I searched. I stopped, looked around, and found it was what I needed.
Other links that I clicked on when searching for blogging help were focused more on the “making money” aspect of it, or selling their ebooks. I was desperate to get help with the mechanics of setting up the blog and had given up on finding a “one stop shopping” site for that purpose.

I was actually searching for “using AdSense with WordPress” when I stumbled upon Caroline’s blog, not in an effort to find help with the design elements, but because I am totally confused about WordPress and AdSense and how they relate (or don’t).

But I struck a gold mine when I found Caroline, because although her blog doesn’t actually answer that question for me, it actually answers all of my other questions about design elements quite nicely, all in one place, and free of charge.

Google (and other search engines) are quite mysterious as far as how they decide what a person should see in a given moment after doing a search. There might be a hundred people, even thousands, doing what Caroline does, saying the same things. If they’re all as helpful as Caroline, I wish them all the best in getting their fair share of the pie in terms of audience.

Saying that Caroline shouldn’t post her articles or sell her books because they’re redundant is akin to saying that no one should make and offer another browser or spreadsheet package or word processor or operating system, because Microsoft has already done that. We’ve seen how the public reacted to that.

Keep up the good work, Caroline. I’m glad I found you!

Karen