Google Adsense Smart Pricing - A New Method to avoid it

Google Adsense introduced smart pricing in order to give advertisers more value for the money they spend. Adsense Smart Pricing can have a lot of impact on the income from your website or your blog. In order to make sure that you are not a 'smart priced' it is important to first understand what Google Smart Pricing is all about. Take out a 10 minutes to read this entire post in detail and find out how you can increase your eCPM and get more money out of the same amount of your website traffic. This post is a result of my systematic experiments spread over 2 to 3 months. If you already know about smart pricing, jump to the new method discussed here.

How does Google Adsense Smart Pricing work?

Adsense Smart Pricing is a method used by Google to give advertisers more value for their money. For example if Google 'feels' that a click is less valuable for an advertiser then instead of paying publishers the whole value of the click, only a small percentage of it is paid. There are several factors which Google uses to determine the 'value' of a click on your Google Adsense ad by your visitor. Some of the factors include

1. Your content and its relevance to the ad (for example an ad for selling Nikon camera will earn more if placed near a Camera review instead of say digital photography techniques).
2. Your website's authority on that subject (for example a camera ad on a website on photography is considered more valuable than that on a personal website which talks about everything).
   
3. The conversion rate for the advertiser. This is the most important factor and is explained in detail below.
   

Google Adsense - Conversion rate - the most important smart pricing factor

Advertisers who use Google Adwords to market their product have the option of tracking how many clicks they buy actually convert into sales or signing up of newsletter or whatever the final goal of the advertiser. This conversion rate is tracked by Google using a cookie based system and a small javascript code which advertisers place on their 'conversion page'.

How to avoid Adsense Smart Pricing?

In general it is very hard to say if you are being smart priced or not. Sometimes its easy though, when smart pricing eats up over 90% of the value of a click. In any case, it is worth trying to do whatever you can to increase your click through rate. Here are some ideas to avoid it. Some of these ideas can be found elsewhere on the Internet however one of the idea which involves Chitika is new. It has been actually tested by me for 1.5 months and it has brought a significant increase in my CPC (Cost Per Click).

1. Content related measures to avoid Smart Pricing - It is important that you actually have good useful content on your website. If you send junk visitors through Adsense, i don't see any method how you can avoid smart pricing - as easy as that. Another important point to keep in mind about content is to try to focus on one particular niche for your website (if possible) rather than writing about everything under the sun.
   
2. Link Units related measures to avoid Smart Pricing - There are certain spots on your website which receive highest attention. It is highly recommended that you put a normal ad unit instead of a link unit on this spot.
   
   
3. Using Chitika to reduce Smart Pricing (New Method) - This one, i believe is relatively new and quite successful way of minimizing the effect of smart pricing. The way it works is the following. You Sign up with Chitika and place one or two additional ads on your website so that your visitors have larger options for clicking. This increases the possibility of the fact that those who click on adsense are really interested in it. Chitika ads are shown only to your Search Engine visitors so your regular visitors, won't even notice there is a Chitika Ad on your website. For best results you should choose two of the following three Chitika ads - (1) Chitika 480x180 unit just on top of content (2) Chitika Mega Unit just below content (3) Chitika Linx. Naturally placing Chitika may decrease your Adsense CTR. However the idea is to increase your total income not your CTR. In about a months time not only will your Adsense CPC increase, but also your combined income from Chitika and Adsense will be much more than that of Adsense alone. I have seen about 25-30% increase in my overall income. Signup with Chitika and give it a shot.
   

Note that the data on conversion rate is updated weekly by Google Adsense. So any experiments you do, will not give you instant results. It is reasonable to run any experiment and/or its variation for at least a month to make reasonable conclusions. Feel free to discuss your opinion in a comment.