Monetize Your Site

I have done some further research on Smart Pricing for Adsense. It turns out that this is not a new thing, as it was instituted by Google in 2004, about 5 years ago now. The reasoning for instituting the program is so that Google advertisers will get better value for their advertising dollar making the Google program more attractive to advertisers. The premise is that the advertiser will pay less for lower quality clicks. The downside, as far as publishers are concerned, is that this is done on an account wide basis. If most of your sites provide high quality clicks but one site starts providing low quality clicks the publisher is in danger of falling under smart pricing and the high quality clicks will also be priced at the low quality rate.

It appears that the alarm sirens may be a bit louder than necessary. The Smart Pricing position is reviewed on a weekly basis. Since the Adsense program can produce substantial income for the publisher the best advice that I can give is to just watch your payment per click and if you see a substantial drop to analyze the situation. Dropping ads from one site may get you back to the regular pricing tier and keep your income in line with your general traffic.

From my research and my own experience it does not appear that a low click through rate is a solid indicator of the site that is the problem. It appears that the quality of traffic is the key, quality being defined as the attach rate rather than the click through rate. By this I mean how many of the clicks from the site result in the hoped for action on the part of the visitor, ie: a sale or a sign-up. The thinking is that search engine traffic that results in a click may have a higher attach rate than traffic from social bookmarking sites or from returning regular visitors. The hint that Google uses is that clicks from a photography tips site may not carry the same value as clicks from a camera review site, for instance. This would be because the visitors to the tips site might click on an ad for general information purposes but not really be in the market to buy, while the visitors to the review site are probably looking for information to help them with a buying decision so they are more likely to make a purchase.

If you provide quality content that targets your visitors you may never run afoul of  Smart Pricing. If you pay attention to what is going on with your Adsense account you will probably be able to identify the problem and take corrective actions. If you do notice or suspect that you have fallen under Smart Pricing you will need to look for a change in traffic or content to identify the problem and take the appropriate corrective action. Dropping a profitable income stream like Google Adsense because of one under performing site is not the best choice in the matter.

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.