Adsense Smart-Pricing Myths

[TheCite]

First I want to say hello, as this is my first post here, and I really think I am going to like this place. Seems like a lot of good information here and some very knowledgable people.

That being said, I wanted to open up for discussion something I saw on another forum recently, and that has to do with Smart Pricing. Some people erroneously think that refreshing their own pages, for example, can invoke smart pricing.

From what I have gathered, Smart Pricing is a metric used by Google to place a value on the quality of traffic a publisher is pushing through to advertisers. The core component of this metric is conversion tracking. They do this through Adwords conversion tracking, as far as I know. So for advertisers who do not use conversion tracking, or industries where it is less common, you may end up with different results.

The bottom line is if the people who CLICK on the ads on your site go and purchase items, fill out forms or do whatever else the advertiser has marked as a conversion, you will be viewed as providing quality traffic and can avoid smart-pricing.

If your clicks go to the advertiser page but rarely, or never sign-up or buy anything, you are likley to be hit by Smart Pricing. My understanding is they re-evaulate the smart pricing once a week, and that it will lower the price you receive for all pages and ads on your Adsense account.

As mentioned, this is my understanding and atempt to potentially clear up some mis-understandings, as well as learning from others more knowledgable than me. So if I said something that might be wrong or can be improved upon, by all means set me straight.