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Just keeping on the theme of adsense I have noticed something quite interesting recently with my adsense revenue. Perhaps someone can shed some light on what is going on.

Throughout recent times of visitng forums etc I have heard of smart pricing - this is where all of a sudden your value per click seems to go down - It didn’t really worry me as I was getting some decent values for clicks - sometimes $2 for a single click - and the average day left me with $5 or so in general. I always knew I was getting sometimes a minimal amount per click but this was balanced with occasional nicer valued click - I always assumed this was simply down to the keywords used on that page the ad was clicked + the ad the clicker chose to click on.

This particular site that earned a reasonable amount was pretty much the only site I had Adsense on. Around Christmas last year I had Adsense on one of my larger shopping sites - this gave a good amount of earnings though low CTR - but as it was Christmas there were a lot of visitors shopping so it didn’t matter - my best day was $60 across a couple of sites - averaging around $40 per day over the run up until Christmas.

After Christmas there was a huge drop which is what I anticipated - back down to $5 or so per day across the sites. I felt that Google Adsense was potentially jeopardising the integrity of my store - after all it doesn’t look too professional to have adverts on a store you intend to sell products from. With the benefits being so minimal I decided to remove the Adsense from the site all together and just leave it on the one site that seemed to do OK.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time but my advertising revenue actually increased - I put this down to me adding additional pages etc to the site with the Adsense still remaining.

Now bearing in mind I now have only Adsense on one site  with visitors only reaching around 30 a day -

Now I have another two sites that have around 600 visitors each per day. I’m thinking well why not stick some Adsense onto these - could generate some revenue.

I added some additional ad units to the other sites and optimised them as I saw fit.

2 days later my ad revenue has dropped by 50%  - yes I am still getting clicks from the newly added Adsense units but the CTR is much much lower. I am still getting the same number of clicks from the original site but they all now seem to be worth 10%  the value they used to be worth.

Could this be smart pricing? The general theory of smart pricing is that if you have two identical adverts on two different sites one with high CTR and one with a very low CTR - the lower CTR could be payed less as it is considered lesser performing. Is this being applied to my whole account due to low CTR on the high traffic sites?

When learning about optimising Google Adsense,  most say to use the full quantity of adverts allowed - this is 3 x content units and a link unit. but having these units will lower your overall CTR as each visitor will only have the potential of clicking one advert.

Google makes out on it’s blog that click through ratio (CTR) does not cause an effect to advertisers - does this mean publishers as well? but if so, how can this be the case.

Something very fishy is going on here and I feel it must be smart pricing.

So I am now considering removing all adverts from non performing site - Mainly the high traffic ones. Sites such as this very blog will naturally have low CTR as people are not looking to buy items they are looking for information - if my theory here is correct by having a site capable of decent CTR and putting Adsense on a site that has very low CTR I am making a substantial loss.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.