I was happily making a few dollars a day with adsense and when I redesigned some pages on my site, I expected due to the redesign to get more page views but the same number of clicks and hence revenue. What happened was traffic has gone up a little (un related), page views about double, no of clicks about the same, (as expected) but revenue down by half, it seems that average earnings per click is about 1/2 what it was before, anyone got any ideas on this?

A smartpricing update seemed to have happened a couple days ago. Perhaps that's what is causing it.

Originally Posted by ChickenCamels

A smartpricing update seemed to have happened a couple days ago. Perhaps that's what is causing it.

No clue about this. What is that.

Basically when you send enough good traffic to your advertisers, they will pay more to put ads on your site. It also works vice-versa. If you send bad traffic, they pay less. It all has to do with what they view as conversions for your site.

Mark,

I think you should wait a little bit before making conclusions out of this. It may be something temporary.

Mark I agree with Tony. Give it a little time before making any more changes. This could just be something temporary. It may not be an indication of something permanent, but it's usually not a good idea to react every time revenue goes down for a few days.

Here's what Google says about Smart Pricing.

I've been reading more about smartpricing, its seems it affects your whole account not just one site (can anyone confirm that?), I have 4 sites with google ads but only one of them gets any real traffic and hence clicks. Good advice about waiting, today the numbers were back up to how they were before, I plan to wait another week at least before I draw any conclusion - thanks for the advice everyone

Mark from what I understand smart pricing is based on your account and not on a specific site. So any site in your account has the potential to either help or hurt the revenue of your other sites.

Steven,

Can you please provide more information about Smart Pricing. I've read the article you pointed to above, but still it's not clear.

Can I consider Smart Pricing as "Sand Box" in SEO? Does this mean that Google will restrict your earnings for a specific period? If I'm getting from Google (let's say 10$/day), does this mean according to Smart Pricing that I will get stuck with this amount forever? If not, how can I change that?

From what I know now, it seems that no matter how many clicks you get from adsense the average amount of money that you will receive will remain the same because if you're stuck with a 10$ limit, this means that if you received this amount, Google will simply stop sending you high-paying ads and thus, you'll end crying with those 10$ ? Please explain more.

thanks :-)

Tony - smartpricing is not a sandbox, its where google adjust the advertising cost to bidders for clicks on your site according the google (perceived) conversion ratio, smartpricing in theory can raise the value of your clicks and well as send it down, but how do they know the conversion rations (see my other thread - google being secretive)

so, this is not valid for only a specific period of time?

not sure to be honest, it seems they do smartprice updates periodically, but I don't know if thats an algorithm update or a general site assesment update, I would image sites are re-asssesed fairly frequently, but as I say in my other thread - google are very secretive which makes it hard for to understand whats going on sometimes, my daily revenue used to be quite steady, now its up and down like crazy, I'm gonna (as advised) leave a while longer before I try changing anything
Good luck

Smart pricing happens all the time, from my experience. Sometimes my rates go down over a week and pickup after a month or so. Cant do much about it

I think Google is purposely vague on smart pricing. The way I understand it is Google looks at a variety of factors to determine how much an ad pays out. I think they do things on both the advertiser and publisher side.

Not much you can do about the advertiser side of things, and I don't think Google's ever said all that much about what is or isn't looked at from the publisher side.

I think the best you can do if you have more than one site using AdSense is turn the ads on one site off and see if the average price for the rest goes up or down to get an idea what the effect of the site you turned off is having.

When I first heard about smart pricing I searched a lot for information and never really found much. That Google post was really the best information I found.

I've just removed almost all the ads except the major ones on my website to see how this will affect my results. It would be a disaster if this would mean that no matter what you work hard, Google will just say ... ummm .. you deserve only 3 cents per click, so your 100 hardly earned clicks per day will pay you 3 $ ... Man! go and get your Porsche, what are you waiting for? LOOL!

I'm begining to wonder if my adsence displays on this site are adversly affecting my smartpricing rating, if so I should turn them off as the revenue from this site is far to small to worry about, and i've seen my adsence earnings now drop to 25% of what they were before despite overall traffic on my main site going up, trouble is there is no way to know - google are so secretive

Give it some time. It's spring break across the nation, which means people are either saving for their vacation, are on their vacation, or are broke from their vacation (since the actual week varies in march across the nation)... either way across the board profits are down.

I noticed a slowing as well on all my sites.

Oh, one more thing to add...

On the positive side it means that my adwords have not been costing me as much over the last few days as well.

The whole system is based on what advertisers are willing to bid for their keywords, and what visitors are willing to click on when they come to your site.

Thing is Rick - most of my traffic comes from Europe and the middle east, before daily revenue didn't vary much, now it varies loads, but I'm gonna give it a while longer, its Easter in Europe and some religous festival in Muslim countries - so your 'spring break' idea might not be far of the mark

Every time that we think we are doing really well with Google, the bottom falls and there has been what almost looks like an adjustment to keep a gradual incline in your revenue from growing too fast. Saying the bottom falls is an exaggeration because our revenue has continuously increased in general since early last year when we really started dedicating our advertising through Google Adsense.

Our cost per click has really declined in the last month for some reason and that is puzzling but American Idol did just start up again didn;t it (I hear that spikes Net traffic in a negative way for many websites, like Amazon and Ebay).

I don't know much about the Pricing deal but have taken in all of your inoput regarding this and I thank you for that. The bundling by account was eye opening to me.

Thanks so much and it feels good to participate. I will try to add anything good to anything that I feel I might have good info about.