Adsense Smart Pricing is Bad but How to Avoid It?

The first thing you should know before blogging for money is the Adsense smart-pricing. It's a technique to improve value to advertisers by reducing the price they pay per adclick, ultimately reducing the pay publishers get per adclick. If you are in the categories whose blogs are smart-priced, then you'll be earning much less than what you were supposed to if you're not smart-priced. This article explains what smart-pricing is, what factors affect blogs to be smart-priced, and how to avoid being smart-priced. This guide is a summary based on Google facts and best tips on smart-pricing from top blogs.

Image credit: josef.stuefer.

What is Smart Pricing from Google standpoint?
Smart pricing was intoduced in April 2004 to improve advertisers Return On Investment (ROI) by adjusting the price of certain clicks. Here are some facts and implications on smart pricing based on the Goggle AdWords announcement:

• Prices per click for advertisers are adjusted based on Google network's data of click conversion to advertisers' business actions (e.g. sales, registration, etc).
• Cost-per-click (CPC) is reduced if that action improves value to advertisers.
• Ad price estimation is affected by many factors such as keywords and types of blogs. For example, an adclick on videocam placed on a general photography tips blog may cost less than a click on the same ad placed next to specs and reviews on videocam.
• The estimation of click values is done continuously and on an ongoing basis that ultimately saves advertisers time and money.
• Advertisers get greater value and performance as the ad costs are appropriately set based on the quality and relevancy of information provided by sites/blogs to their customers.

Google explained further in its official Adsense blog about the facts on smart pricing as there are some misconceptions to how it's being implemented:

• Ad prices are determined based on many factors: advertisers bid, quality of ad, other competing ads, ad campaign time period, and advertisers' conversion rate.
• Click-through-rate (CTR) doesn't affect advertisers' ROI. Smart pricing is introduced to benefit advertisers, and the only thing that matters is the percentage of click conversion to ROI. Publishers' CTR has nothing to do with advertisers' ROI. What matters is clicks that bring in highly relevant customers that result in business actions.
• Advertisers gain more from sites that bring in quality clicks (due to readers interest in their quality and relevant content). Generic clicks do not convert much to value for the advertisers. To gain most from Adsense, publishers should improve content quality, bring in targeted traffic, and improves the relevancy of content to ads.
• The system of determining ad prices is updated regularly to improve the value to advertisers.

How Smart Pricing Affects Bloggers/Publishers?
Many bloggers have had some experiences on Adsense smart-pricing that affect the type of niche they choose and how they blog. Some of these experiences weren't highlighted by Google's guides. In essence, bloggers need to be aware of smart pricing and careful when first finding a niche to blog about if they want to gain the most from Adsense. I have compiled the most important 'facts' about Adsense smart-pricing based on these experiences around the blogosphere:

• Reduced earning - Smart price means that the earning per click is reduced if your blog is being smart-priced. For example, you might earn $0.05 per click on an ad that could actually bring you $0.50 if you're not smart-priced. It also means that the advertisers pay less per click on ads these ads than the actual bidding price.
• Affects entire account - Smart-pricing affects the entire Adsense account. If you have multiple blogs and only one of them is actually being smart-priced because it brings in low conversion rate to advertisers, then all the other blogs under the same Adsense account will be affected also eventhough these other ones converts well.
• Won't know if you're being smart priced - You won't know which sites are being smart-priced and which are not, and you don't have any data to make any correct guess. What you can do to know whether your blog is being smart priced is by observing its performance or make educated guesses based on your earning per click or CTR.
• Smart-pricing can be reversed - If your account is affected, remove Adsense ads from sites that you think are actually being smart-priced to avoid being smart-priced on sites that convert well.
• Updated on weekly basis - Smart pricing is evaluated on a weekly basis. Changes are likely to occur the week after you've made any changes that affect smart-pricing.
• Setup additional account - Some bloggers have set up additional Adsense account to serve different sites so that well-converting sites are not affected by smart pricing. But this requires approval from Google and actually difficult to get. Publishers need to provide additional company details or have different names for different accounts.

Does CTR Affect Smart Pricing?
Some bloggers say that blogs with low CTR will be smart-priced. This is contradictory to Google's statement. But many have experienced that the earnings per click is less when they have lower CTR, which then forced them to delete Adsense from these accounts so that it won't affects other blogs that do well on CTR. Courtney gave a tip that blogs with CTR less than 3% should not put Adsense to avoid getting smart-priced on the entire accounts.

Although Google says that CTR doesn't affect smart pricing, it can affect smart pricing indirectly. Blogs that have low CTR most likely are serving ads poorly targeted to the content. Some readers that do click on these ads tend to not be interested by the services/products offered on the advertiser sites as they're not targeted to the readers interest. So, in a way, low CTR blogs do seem to be smart-priced because of their poorly targeted ads. Accidental clicks on poorly targeted ads also convert to low CTR.

Traffic from social networks are well known to convert to low CTR compared to traffic from search engines. Visitors from social networks come across blogs/posts because of their reputation or popularity, not entirely because they are searching for them. They are not likely to click on ads. On the other hand, visitors from search engines come across blogs/posts because they are searching for those targeted contents and are likely to click on targeted ads to know more about those products/services that interest them.

Blogs about blogging (e.g. making money using blogs, blog tips) typically also convert to low CTR as bloggers are more familiar with the concept of contextual advertising and aren't likely to click on ads (hint: think about your tendency of clicking ads on blogs about blogging). This is not to say that these blogs will automatically be smart-priced, but many bloggers blogging on these topics do experience a huge drop on CTR and earnings per click compared to blogs on other niche topics. The key is about bringing quality customers that convert to advertisers business. If your blogs do provide high quality content and do bring in quality customers that improve advertisers' ROI, then there's no good reason for your blog to be smart-priced.

Tips To Avoid Being Smart-Priced
These are tips that have been compiled from many top blogs on the topics of smart pricing:

• Create highly targeted content to search engine traffic.
• Improves blog with highly targeted content and high quality articles that draw more interest to visitors on products/services being discussed or reviewed.
• Improves Adsense design and placement to improves CTR.
• Avoid blogging about blogs to avoid audience that don't tend to click ads (i.e. don't target us!).
• Avoid building contents with the intention of targeting only social networks.
• Delete Adsense on blogs that are being smart-priced, have low CTR (less than 3%), or generate low earnings per click (around $0.10 or less).
• If possible (but extremely difficult), ask permission to create multiple Adsense accounts - one for blogs that convert well, and another for blogs that you suspect are being smart-priced.

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This post is a summary based on Google announcement and tips on smart pricing from top blogs. The post length is 1342 words.

How to Reduce Ad-Blindness

Skellie gave out some tips to prevent ad-blindness – the tendency to overlook the ads after frequent visits. Reducing ad-blindness increases your click-through-rate (CTR) and brings more revenues to your blog. Here’s the gist of her tips.

We, the readers, don’t go through a blog’s page inch by inch. Things get bypassed including those ads. So how do we reduce this bypassing and to increase CTR?

Many people think that to get higher CTR, they need to:

• Put up more ads.
• Make ads bigger.

This is not true. It’s more likely to cause the ads look clustered and obstructive - and thus gets filtered away.

Here are tips to get more attention to your ads:

• Put elements of high interest nearer to the ads – your readers’ may stumble upon the ads too. But don’t put too close to trick your readers to accidentally click the ads. It's is simply irritating.
• Put fewer and smaller ads. Readers may actually look at the ads because they stand out more and not many of them to cluster the page.

The real key is to experiment with ad-placement, number of units, sizes, and colors as well for a week before making any changes to see real results.

The bottom line is, clickers are readers – they’ll click only when they mean to do it after thinking about it. To let them have the chance to think about it is to allow them proper attention, both to the content and to the ads – and the best way to do this is not to clutter the page by having too many ads covering too much space.

Photo by brtsergio.

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This is a summarized and adapted version of an original post by Skellie at DailyBlogTips.com (Alexa rank: 14,599) with a length of 546 words. It’s been cut by 52% to 264 words.

SEO-Related Mistakes You Must Avoid

Terri Wells wrote in SEOCHAT.com mistakes related to SEO that should be avoided by webmasters. These mistakes could have bad results on your site’s position in search engines, traffic, and revenues which in the end badly hurts your strategy especially if your sites are intended as money generators. Some of the main ideas of her article are summarized here.

Keep Your Site Always Accessible
Taking your site down offline, due to maintenance for example, is bad for search engine optimization (SEO) as this will upset visitors especially regular readers. Even worst is if search engine robots crawl your site when it is down. Your site will be assumed to have expired and lost its position in search engine results pages (SERP).

To climb up the search engine rankings afterward when it’s up online would require full SEO effort again. It’s better for you to put up a mirror site when your original site needs to go offline.

If the site is a business portal and you’re not able to attend to it, say during vacation, it’s best to just let it up and running than to have it down. One advantage is that when it’s online your site has a chance to climb up the SERP. You can place a note saying that you’re not available during a certain time to avoid confusion or have forms for them to still place orders.

Spend Time and Money Wisely
There are tendencies for people who don’t know SEO to hire SEO companies to improve SERP positions drastically. Largely, these are spamming. Most of these companies will build large number of links to your sites. What people don’t know is that the links come from unrelated sites that aren’t counted as valuable to get your position up in SERP.

Search engines also have the ability to detect suspicious links, especially a large number of them and may penalize you for that. As a rule of thumb, good links take time and don’t come cheap.

Search engine crawlers eventually will index your new site, so it’s a waste of time to submit the URL yourself to search engines (although there are tips that say otherwise).

Submitting your URL to directories also have less effect on SERP nowadays compared to a few years ago because today’s search engines have more advanced and improved criteria indexing sites and blogs – most directories are now classified as link farms only, which is not seen as valuable links.Submitting to manually edited site like Wikipedia won’t do any good because they are set with a “nofollow” property, meaning that crawlers do not follow outbound links.

Compromising Content is a Bad Thing
The strategy of splitting content in subdomains to gain more spots in SERP is not a good one. It risks visitors’ experience as the contents are divided in different subdomains or even domains making it harder to find. In the long term, your readers’ bad experience dominates and affects your site negatively in terms of traffic and in the end conversions to revenues.

There are reports mentioning that some sites aren’t crawlable and thus won’t lend them positions in SERP. Some of the main causes are:

• Incorrect robots.txt files.
• Need Session IDs.
• URLs have too many variables.
• Complex navigation menu.
• Too much use of AJAX, Flash, or graphics.

The good trend is to make it as simple as possible.

Although one should focus on SEO to get noticed, compromising content is not the way to go. Many have made this mistake. In a bigger picture, the main purpose people search the internet is to find good content; tricking them into sites without real and valuable content won’t last long.

Don't Abuse Keywords
Today’s search engines are advanced enough to have the ability to detect keyword abuse as spamming. And, they’re advanced enough to penalize those sites that do this. Types of keyword abuse include:

• Stuffing content too much with keywords.
• Stuffing meta tags, titles, and headers with keywords.
• Having the same meta tags on every page (identified by robots as duplicating contents).
• Tricking readers with hidden keywords (keywords with background color to make them invisible).

Good Practices
Targeting general keywords will make it nearly impossible to rank in SERP. Instead, try targeting longer and specific keywords such as “making money with blogs” rather than just “money” with too much competition from more established websites. New sites will have more chances of crawling up the SERP using more specific keywords, and results into better conversion if your main goal is to make money.

Focusing too much on building the perfect keyword density is not a good idea too because this makes your writing flows unnaturally, too repetitive with the same keywords, and boring to the readers. Write naturally and let those keywords fall into place. Forcing it only makes your content unreal and annoying to read.

Update: This following article gives compact SEO tips to improve your search engine ranking.

Photo by *L*u*z*a*.

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This post is a summary of an original post by Terri Wells at SEOCHAT.com (Alexa rank: 2740). The original length of 1848 words has been cut down to 806 words (56% less).