How to get smartpriced like me...

Status
Not open for further replies.
P

Polyphonic

New member
Sep 28, 2006
124
3
0
So, there I am, happy with my little arbitrage plan after my successful experiments this week.

Or at least, successful until today.

I was getting around 25% CTR on Adsense and making a nice little profit but oh no, I got greedy. I thought that I'd try improving the CTR by changing the layout slightly and, stupidly, kept uploading it, refreshing and then viewing it. Unhappy with the layout, I'd edit it, upload it again, refresh it again etc..

So, this has let my pages to multiple impressions (from me) but no clicks from me (obviously). Of course my CTR when down but I didn't think it'd matter because it's all from my IP address and perhaps they'd see it's for testing purposes.

As of this morning all my clicks are around the 0.01 area. Nice.



I've taken my sites offline as I suspect I've been smartpriced and I just hope that a few days/week offline will fix things. The thing is, ALL my sites are offline, I don't have any up, so I just hope it will fix things. What do you guys think?


Fingers crossed anyway...


So here's the moral: don't keep looking/tweaking your arbi sites online, do it OFFLINE!


I'm going to go and cry in the corner now, thank you for your time.
 


dont worry, iv been smart priced like 3 times this last 2 months haha, you just wait a week or so and try again, sometimes youl get half way unsmartpriced, and then you gotta make that profit as well... well, cheers, and good luck to you.
 
So if I carry on making my new sites, upload those and THEN upload my old sites in about a week?

I've just been reading some stuff online and maybe I'm being paranoid and that the 0.01 clicks are that value by coincidence.

*shrugs*

Ah well..
 
dude, you were smart priced. Just wait for a week or 4 and you will be reset. the smart price cookie only lasts 30 days
 
If you are testing your ads, then use this in the google code.

google_adtest=’on’;

I'm not sure how it's tracked, but it even allows you to click test them.
 
That doesn't have anything to do with smartpricing. Ad prices can also change based on a number of factors, including inventory, time of day etc.

I can have the same page get lower clicks one day and the next day have much higher clicks. Smart pricing only gets adjusted for once a week and it has NOTHING to do with your CTR rate. It is a metric to determine the value of the traffic to the advertiser.

I don't think it is a bad plan to actually manage smart pricing and reduce spending when and if you are smart priced. To effectively do that, though, you have to actually know when you are smart-priced and when you are just the victim of flucuations.

Out of curiosity how many ad units do you have on your page?
 
I'm in a similar boat, where I did a major redesign to increase my ctr, testing, tweaking, refreshing. Unfortunately I had no idea that my pageviews was being tracked as a vistor... Google should have something like sitemeter where they block my ip as a visit.

This sort of tweaks me because I build my arbi sites with wordpress and I often view my site in order to check if I haven't missed anything like an image might be incorrectly aligned... Another thing is wordpress has a preview feature where when you save a post and decide to edit it, it shows a preview at the bottom of the page, and I believe google counts that as a visit as well, even though I don't scroll down far enough to actually see it.

I just read the jensense blog regarding smart pricing so I guess the only thing to do is take down my site for a week and re-upload them, seems like so much trouble for viewing my own site... its like I'm being punished for looking down on my peepee so I don't spray urine all over the place.
 
Doobus, where did you get the idea that impressions have anything to do with smart pricing?

Smart pricing is based on advertiser conversions. They have tracking cookies on advertiser sites and they determine to smart priced based on whether or not the traffic you are sending to advertisers is converting. I suspect some industries have a smaller percentage of advertisers even using conversion tracking than others, so it can be very industry specific.

Here is an example:

Example A:

You click and view your own page 2000 times, and the 2001 impression is a visitor who clicks on your ad. He proceeds to the advertiser's site and actually buys something, and Google tracks this purchase. You are not marked as having converting traffic. So you will not be smart priced, Since 100% of all your traffic converted.

Example B:
You don't view your page at all. You get 50% CTR on your ads and get 100 clicks a day. None of those people sign-up or act upon the ad. You end up being smart priced because your traffic is not converting and is thus less valuable to advertisers.

That is a very simplified explanation. Just realize that smart pricing has to do with the advertisers and how the traffic is converting. If you want to avoid smart pricing then you need to work on making sure you have a high quality traffic and you are not misleading them. This means for an arbitrage site you have to be sure you are driving relevant visitors to advertisers. If you are just scattershooting off-kilter keywords, your chances of getting smart priced goes up substantially.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Rob_TID
Thanks for clarifying, I can now look at my peepee again so I don't piss all over the place.
 
So, this has let my pages to multiple impressions (from me) but no clicks from me (obviously). Of course my CTR when down but I didn't think it'd matter because it's all from my IP address and perhaps they'd see it's for testing purposes.
Click to expand...

I often do the same when designing, one day I got worried about it after reading a post that someone got banned from Adsense for doing this and contacted Goolge, told them I was working on a project and refreshing it sometimes as much as 500 times throughout a full day of designing.

Ill try to find the e-mail, but they assured me that creating multiple imrpressions from your IP will have absolutely NO negative effect on your Adsense account.

I was smartpriced not to long ago myself, I made some changes and within about a weeks time I was back to the norm again. Find the problem fix it and then just hang in there, work with YPN or something for the next week or so.

Jeremy
 
Thanks for the reassuring replies guys, really helpful :) (love this place..) The adtest code should come in really useful.

I was running 1 ad unit (square) but the day before I noticed my income drop I had increased it to 3 (leaderboard, square and half banner). That may be the problem - for arbitrage I guess one ad unit is the way to go.

Anyway, thanks so much for the help - my faith in all this is back up!


Oh and I can't apply to YPN just yet as I don't have a site that I think they'd approve (not enough contact). I might make something to specifically get approved with YPN with. Does anybody know what sort of thing they take into account, and how 'good' the site needs to be before the approve?


Oh and +rep for aeiouy for being the first person to make the concept of smart-pricing understandable. I've done so much searching today but the answers were right here..
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom