Monetize Your Site

In my travels around the web last evening I ran across a piece of Adsense Intelligence about Adsense Smart Pricing (link to article). The blogger explains that accounts with poor click through rates get bumped down to a second tier pricing structure that Google maintains called Smart Pricing. He states that revenue per click can be about 10% of the real value of the click if your account falls under smart pricing.

I did a quick check and found that my best sites do not measure up to the minimum. I will be looking into this situation a bit more. I have adsense ads on all of my pages. If the situation is as suggested in the article I will need to pull most of those ads and research where the few clicks that I do get come from. I can think of many pages where the likelihood of getting a click is very small. Luckily I do the ads with an include file on my sites, so if I decide to drop the ads completely I can just substitute a blank file. I will be looking for a replacement for some of the sites, as I want to maintain the possibility of a small income to defray expenses even on those sites. The sites where I can identify that I get clicks from some pages but not others will be a bit more hectic, but with a find and replace function in my text editor I will be able to make adjustments where needed.

If/when I make further discoveries about this information I will let you know, but for now, the best recommendation that I can give is to put adsense ads only on well targeted pages on sites where people may be open to buying something. This probably excludes several of my sites.