Adsense, CTR & Smartpricing
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?






September 5th, 2008 at 11:40 am
[...] Go to the author’s original blog: Adsense, CTR & Smartpricing [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
[...] Lukasz7669 wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt[#2: Edit Options>MightyAdsense>Adsense Code]. 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. … [...]
September 8th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Well, I’m not an expert but the best adsense guru I know is Griz. He makes mad money on Blogger blogs. Here’s his take on smart pricing
Now, since you’re not on Blogger, why don’t you use WP plugins to avoid smart pricing from social traffic and only reveal to search engine traffic?
I recommend either Who Sees Ads or a modified version of Shylock Adsense.
PRs last blog post..Card Magic Tricks
September 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
It’s interesting as I wasn’t aware you may get smart priced from social media traffic - I do not partake in social media sites apart from digging the occasional post so I guess it doesn’t apply to me.
I don’t get how the social media sites really work if I am honest.
Thanks
September 11th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I recently took Adsense off a poorly converting website and also implemented Griz’s suggestion on another site to only show adds to search users. It does seem to have helped.
September 12th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Griz seem to be very popular. I’ve heard of smart pricing but have no idea exactly what it means and what it does. I guess I will find out one day.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:13 pm
The problem is that in order to test the hypothesis, one needs a lot of clicks.
But I guess that when the CTR is low on blog, one should take the ads off anyway, or am I wrong?
October 11th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I find that ad clicks on adsense are all over the place. I have gotten .01-1 in value and its so random. It gets annoying when you get the low ones.
October 15th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I know how you feel, clicks in a niche site I am am working hard on dropped to a few pennies, sadly there are almost no affiliate offers to cover that specific niche other than amazon, maybe I will substitute with Adbrite to see what happens. Great post by the way, great points discussed.
Archie Penniess last blog post..Are You Promoting Your Blog on Spicy Page?
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:56 am
It’s long been believed that low clickthrough rates lead to lower adsense revenue. Would be great if you could post a followup sometime.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Personally I feel that adsense is not performing to its potential in a lot of sites.
Miras last blog post..Finasteride for Male Pattern Baldness
November 19th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Due to recent recession problem around the world created this problem with Google Ads as well. I am also getting less income through clicks.