Smart Pricing

[Mike]

Is this something that actually happens with Google? Recently my average CPC has droppped significantly and I'm wondering if its related to this. Over the last few weeks I was getting a lot of clicks, but recently the value of them has dropped a lot.

So, does it exist? If so, what can be done to improve the situation?

Thanks...

[Chris]

Ahh Adsense... the perpetual arms race. It seems the last few years you just have to keep optimizing and adding more units just to tread water.

There are other reasons that smartpricing when rates may drop though. You may have had a targetted campaign end. Then the economy does affect the advertising budgets of companies and so that could be doing it as well.

[Chris]

.. of course... this is also why it is good to diversify into other types of income, such as ecommerce or affiliate stuff.

[Mike]

Yep, I'm trying to diversify as much as I can now. Adsense has been on fire for the last few months yet it's dropped terribly over the last couple of weeks - so I don't think it's to do with campaigns or the economy. If it was to do with the economy, I think the drop would have been more gradual than what I'm seeing now.

Any other tips to move on from this? On most of my pages I have three units; two regular ones and then one CPA ad. The CPA one doesn't do too much anyway so I'll probably take that off, but I'm thinking of now removing one of the others. Think it'll help?

[ZigE]

Check for mfa / arbitrage sites

[Mike]

As if by magic, things are starting to look better over the last few days. Still, it'd be nice to have a backup plan.

[kisuke]

Do you use Google analytics? this will help you to track where your traffic coming from. try it so you have an idea.

[Chris]

Wait until tommorow, double whammy. End of month, end of quarter. Lots of ad campaigns will probably be ending.

[bermuda]

Sometimes, drops or sudden boosts in prices might be due to the online market conditions and the status of the keywords.

[Cutter]

Google has taken steps to make the content targeting more usable to all users. Its fairly easy to see what publishers send converting traffic, which don't, and exclude those that don't.

This has been possible for a very long time, but it just wasn't quite this easy.

Ad optimization is the name of the game now, advertisers are paying closer attention to what they are buying.