Google Smart Pricing

One of the things that is worth knowing about Adsense is smart pricing. When I first got an Adsense account I slapped Google ads on every site I had and got excited when someone clicked and gave me a few cents!

What bloggers forget though is that unlike say an affiliate program such as eBay:

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Originally uploaded by keso

where the advertiser only pays the blogger if they actually get a a sale: Adsense you get paid even if someone clicks and then clicks away: your readers random clicks on ads can actually cost the advertiser real money and they won’t be happy unless they are seeing a business return!

So Google will “smart price” your ads if your customers aren’t buying from the advertisers they click. Google will smart price all of your websites/hubpages/blogs that you use Adsense on too: not just the site that has the problem.

How to Avoid Smart Pricing

• Don’t add Adsense to your personal blog: its too general to bring either well-paying ads or targeted traffic to your advertisers;
• Read up about ensuring that your Adsense ads are picking up the right keywords from you titles and other SEO tricks: Check out Grizz’s blog on this;
• Don’t add Adsense to a brand new blog or site: let the site mature a bit and get some traffic before you attempt to monetize with Adsense.

How do you know if you are smart-priced? You’ll notice that clicks that used to get you 25c a click now get you 1c or 5c. Although that’s not definite because clicks value does change depending on the readers location, time of day, time of month and lots of other things that Google doesn’t tell us about.

Also be wary of actually discussing the details of your Adsense online or elsewhere in public, from Adense’s Terms of Service:

[you may not disclose] click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.