Big subject. But why do you think you are being smartpriced?

And you might first scroll down to read the recent discussion about smartpricing.

Improve your site content.

Educate your visitors about the products and services that you may expect to see advertised on your site (of course avoid referring to any Ads).

Use your content and links to try to separate the prospective buyers from those who are just looking.

Hopefully, those just looking will find what they need, or a link to it, on your site. Those who chose to click on an add should know what they want and be ready to buy - i.e. good converting visitors for your advertisers.

Rule 1 Content is King

The reason I think I'm being smart priced is because I used to get $0.30 and more for clicks, now I only get less than $0.10.

I think this happened because someone recently put a couple links to pictures on my site on reddit and uniquedaily.

This generated about 500 uniques in the last 20 hours, so it wasn't exactly targetted traffic.

I think some of these people clicked my ads but maybe just bounced off the advertiser's website.

Its easy. Build a site that YOU would bookmark in a second, while making sure the advertisers would like it!

How do I reverse this?

The only way to avoid smart pricing is to remove AdSense as I think some pages on every AdSense account are being smart priced at some level.

I heard YPN has a lovely payout program but the targeting of their ads stinks so you're still losing money.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:35 am (utc) on Nov. 8, 2006]

Well, IMO what you describe isn't smartpricing.

Hunderdown, could you expand on your answer? I'm a noobe just trying to learn the ropes.

well, here is what has worked for me.....

when you look at your site, think about it as if you were directly working for the advertisers. As if, there was no Google in between. If this was the case, you would not want the advertisers to get clicks that bounce back. You would not want to send people to your advertiser's pages by mistake! you would want people to go to your advertisers page if and only if they are interested in what the advertiser is selling, right? Because, after all the advertiser is paying you per click. If you give him stupid clicks, he will not advertise with you!

just keep that in mind. You will be above smart pricing! How?

Well, you will not make adds blend in so much that people click on the adds by mistake, are pissed off, and bounce back!

You will not throw adds all over the place, so that people click on the adds by mistake, are pissed off, and bounce back!

All this, that many people here have been preaching is bull..., it does not benefit your advertiser, so it it does not benefit you, and so the whole system reduces in quality.

Be good! Be nice! Clearly indicate to you visitors that this is an add. Let them choose to click on it or not! Your CTR will fall! It will fall to half! (in my case it did!)

But since, your visitors, actively choose to go to the advertiser's site and want what the advertiser is offering, you are sending your advertiser quality traffic and that will make you above smart pricing.

One thing i learnt the hard way, we are all connected. Anyone acts sneaky and we all loose.

A mini-traffic surge of "500 uniques in the last 20 hours" isn't going to immediately set off smart pricing, which (supposedly) works on weekly cycles. But those new visitors may be interested in different things than your usual visitors are, and so they are clicking on different ads.

If that small a number of visitors is enough to skew your stats, then as other posters have said, you need more content, you need more traffic. A site with unique content, stable, natural traffic, and FEWER than the maximum ad blocks will be minimally affected by smart pricing, if at all. Browse around for posts be Genuine1, for an example of what is possible.

Good luck.