Warning: Google Smart Pricing Your Adsense Earnings

Adsense publishers have been complaining for a while about how sometimes they are puzzled at their earning patterns. Sometimes they tweak a site and earn money quite fine, other times they may have clicks but no adsense earnings. Besides other factors like click fraud, there's another monster that can reduce your adsense revenue. It's name is smart pricing. Let's get down to what smart pricing is all about.

In an effort to protect pay per click advertisers of their adwords program, Google introduced what is called smart pricing. This was sparked by unscrupulous adsense publishers who would set up low quality, basically content-less sites just to make money with adsense. These publishers would direct traffic to pages with adsense keywords whose payout they knew to be high. There was no real value for the user and hence the advertiser at the end of the day. So smart pricing was introduced to set a click value for every ad that is clicked on and the click value is based on certain factors which Google did not make public and understandably so. Google had the following to say:

We’re introducing automatic price adjustments for certain clicks you get from the Google Network. Google’s smart pricing model has always provided better placement for better performing ads, and reduced the cost of a click to the least amount possible to stay above your competitor’s ad. And now, with no change in how you bid, Google may reduce the cost for a click if that better reflects the value it brings to advertisers like you.

How smart pricing works

We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.

We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of clicks and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis. With improved smart pricing, you should automatically get greater value for clicks from ad impressions across our network, all with no change in how you bid.  

How do you ensure adsense revenue? Concentrate on building niche websites and blogs, remember 'Content Is King' so provide quality content for the user.

Hope this post was of help to you!