How Does Google Smart Pricing Affect AdSense Publisher?
What is Google Smart Pricing? Google Smart pricing is designed to help advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaign over Google content network. As a result, Google is making less money since the cost to advertisers is reduced in order to provide a strong ROI. Indirectly, smart pricing affects the earnings of AdSense publishers because they are paid lesser.
Unfortunately, smart pricing is not just affecting publisher's earning on one AdSense site, it affects the entire AdSense account. Regardless of the high performance of other AdSense sites across the AdSense account, if one of your AdSense sites is smart priced, all of your AdSense sites will be affected.
AdSense publishers are earning less because of the low cost-per-1000-impressions (CPM). You could find AdSense publishers revealing their CPM in a forum when their accounts have been smart priced. They normally have low CPM ranging from $1.50 to $5. However, low CPM does not necessary implied that your account has been smart priced. AdSense sites in lower earning niche generally have lower CPM.
What can AdSense publishers do to avoid being smart priced? The best way to ensure your AdSense site is not affected by smart pricing is to create a good environment for advertisers and your readers. Creating compelling content for your targeted readers is as important as providing good user experience on your site. The more targeted traffic to your AdSense site, the better quality clicks for advertisers.
Some AdSense publishers maintain good quality AdSense sites as well as "less than quality" sites under a single AdSense account. They are facing the risk of getting their AdSense account smart priced because any of the less than quality AdSense site does not perform well could be smart priced easily. The increase in revenue of putting these "less than quality" websites could be less than the loss of revenue due to smart pricing on the entire AdSense account.
The smart pricing system should not only be viewed as a system to protect the interests of AdWord advertisers. It is also a system that indirectly benefits quality AdSense sites in the long term. The smart pricing system could force some AdSense publishers to drop those low quality sites. Perhaps with more quality sites, this could boost the advertisers' confidence to advertise in Google content network. Hence, it will bring more competition for keywords. Eventually, AdSense publishers will benefit from the high paying keywords.
