Google AdSense Smart Pricing Experiment

I have read a bit lately about "smart pricing", which is a subject Google has not really talked about much, however, some information has slipped out. It is now known that smart pricing is a way of setting the prices for ads based on the performance of the site they appear on. Basically, the same ad could cost more to show on site 1 than on site 2, if site 1 has proven to have a more effective advertising campaign. It has also been revealed that smart pricing is evaluated weekly.

It has also been determined that smart pricing affects a publishers whole account, not just the web site within the account. So, in theory, one poorly performing web site can drop the income of an entire account.

Knowing this, I went through my account and took a few of the sites with the lowest CTR off AdSense and put them on Amazon, AdBrite or any other system. I planned to wait a week, to make sure a re-evaluation had taken place. Much to my surprise, after a couple days my income increased about 5% - 10% on my account, and I had one day that was actually about 25% higher than average.

After seeing this I immediately went to my log analysis and realized I had pretty average traffic and pretty average click through rate, nothing dramatically different either way, up or down. So, knowing this I can only attribute the difference be the fact I have smart priced myself out of a few dollars over the last few months. I try web sites on this topic or that, and see what happens, always using AdSense.

I consider myself schooled. Build a site, get some traffic and a decent CTR on another system before bringing AdSense over to it. If you don't, it can cost you money. However, my test is only a couple weeks old now, so I am not going to jump too drastically yet, but it certainly is an interesting coincidence.