I reckon i've been smart priced 5 times over the last twelve months but on the bright side, it never seems to last for more than 2 weeks which leaves me even more confused as to what its intentions are/were in the first place.

I'm just entering a smart price shafting, gonad-obliterating bonanza as we speak, income has dropped 60 % since November 3rd despite traffic,clicks and CTR increasing slightly, CPM has halved.

Think i'll go on holiday until the 15th and come back and find it was all a nasty dream ;)

To answer your question, some people probably have escaped smart-pricing, they probably have better quality sites than mine but unless you are a medium sized publisher or bigger, it can be hard to judge smart-pricing trends if you are only making a few dollars a day.

how would you decide that you are completely unsmartpriced if you don't know the advertiser bids and google's share?

but yes, watching epc i believe that i occasionally have been nearly getting the full potential out of the clicks.

I have been with Adsense for two years. In the first year, I have never been smart-priced. Maybe they did not have or use smart-pricing two years ago?

Now in the second year, I have been smart-priced an average of 1 week every month. This first week of November has been the worst for me. My eCPM is down 60%, but the impressions and CTR are about the same. I cannot believe how little I am earning per click.

I tried filtering, reducing ad units on pages, different placements, but all of that does not help one bit. I simply have to wait it out until the smartass-pricing comes out of its nasty cycle.

So what is the conclusive evidence that tells you when you have been "smartpriced"?

I have seen my EPC vary - is it smartpricing every time it goes down?

Do you see a step change or a steady decline?

How do you ensure it has nothing to do with the amount of advertisers available and what they are paying? Or what other people are doing in the market?

How can you tell?

I have been on adsence for at least a couple of years, and slowly but surely my income has risen over that time. No great leaps, but slowly upward, which could just reflect new pages, and better website design over time.

is it smartpricing every time it goes down?

If I remember correctly everybody is smart priced, some positively, some negatively.

how does positive smartpricing work then?

advertisers being charged more money than they have bidden?

google gently resigning a part of their share?

epc and ecpm have risen slightly over the 3+ years I have used adsense. Thats before smartpricing began. So I have not been smartpriced. Traffic and site remains unchanged since before google existed.

I joined June 5th 2004 and my EPC is always in the same range.

Viewing monthly statistics, the highest monthly average EPC is only 82% above the lowest.

Looking only on March 2005 to now, highest only 46% above lowest.

Only 82 percent!

Thats huge! Mines is not a quarter of that on a daily basis over three years.

Monthly its never varied more than single figures %

[edited by: Genuine1 at 9:41 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]

i always wonder how constant most earnings seem to be around here.
my average epc spanned between 3c and 30c (1000%) in the recent years with almost constant respectably high traffic figures.

one more reason why i don't understand the whining everywhere. guys, you don't know nothing about volatile earnings!

These continuous topics about eCPM really do my head in. Does no-one here have a basic understanding of statistics and how they work? There are soooo many variables in determining eCPM for each separate advertiser. As I have said before - you cannot compare different individuals eCPM - as all niches, pages etc, would expect to have different "average" eCPM. Nor can you compare eCPM on your own site, unless you have changed nothing over the period you are looking at. Perhaps your site has been down for periods of time, perhaps Google has been showing charity ads while it changes some info, perhaps you have just added a page on "mesothelioma" (groan), etc, etc. And so the list continues. I think everyone gets far too hung up on eCPM. Whilst it is a useful indication for personal site information, it is not a fixed statistical piece of information, that by comparing yours and someone else's you can glean any useful information.

But while comparing your ecpm to someone elses is meaningless you CAN compare average ecpm rise/fall over a period on your own site.

My sites have not changed in many years. ECPM continues to rise steadily over the 3 plus years with adsense. Thats with 4 to 6k average page views per day. On a daily basis my own ecpm never varies more than 10 percent over the last year!

You can put that down to a bunch of varied topics with a large pool of competing advertisers.

i think we were clearly talking about epc variations here, not ecpm.

[edited by: moTi at 12:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]

"anyone here NEVER been spartpriced?"

I like to believe I have never been smart priced. My site is best value for money for advertisers. EPC variation are all natural variations for me. Smart Pricing does not exist for me.

Do all Guys and Gals think like me.. ;-)

Smart pricing was introduced in April/May 2004. My site had a fairly large decline in average EPC over that summer. I made some changes during the fall and I'd have to say that I haven't seen any variations that are clearly due to smartpricing since then.

As several people have pointed out, a lot of things can change your EPC. I've seen clicks worth a few cents, and others worth a dollar or more. So as just one example, if visitors click more cheap ads one day, and more expensive ads the next, there will be a big change in average EPC. Changes in traffic, visitor behavior, ad inventory, advertiser strategy--all these things and more can affect your EPC.

One other point about smartpricing. It's a discount from the theoretical maximum that an advertiser would pay for a click. If the "smartpricing factor" is currently 60% on a site, and something changes to take it up to 80%, then that site's EPC would go up. So you can recover from a decline, but once you push your site's "rating" back up to 100%, you can't go higher.

Genuine1 "But while comparing your ecpm to someone elses is meaningless you CAN compare average ecpm rise/fall over a period on your own site.
My sites have not changed in many years."

I appreciate that Genuine1 has had little other than normal fluctuations over a prolonged period of time - so I do believe, for you, a comparison is valid within your own figures. You, in a previous thread, mentioned that you had done no significant changes to your site over this period of time.

However, for most people, they are always changing their sites in some way or another. New content is added, perhaps new and different links, their traffic origins have changed, they have changed or altered their advertising at different times etc etc. So it is really very useless to use this figure unless you can use it over a static period of time on your site.

I would suspect, Genuine1 is in a almost unique position if he has not changed, added, or deleted anything in this time frame - I'm dead jealous! :)

And Im dead lazy! I have had 3+ years to add more sites and improve the ones I have but never bothered. I know I could double it easily but cant get motivated!

> anyone here NEVER been smartpriced?

no, not that I know of

when i got smartpriced my ecpm was down from 1-2$ to 0.10$ ... its never going back up.. so I'm having to figure out why and how to resolve this issue.... but if i do increase CTR to make my ecpm go back up... ill likely find more smartpricing, that and my account is on hold due to invalid clicks generated apparantly.. meh.