eCPM Murdered!!!

[RickStar]

Here's the deal.... My estimated adsense cost per click has been slaughted.

I've got a website on a well paying topic and was making about 80c per click from adsense. I got pretty stoked when I started getting about 30 clicks/day without initially doing too much work. (Yeh, we're talkin low numbers here)

So, I put in the hard yards, did the whole SEO thing and I start getting a much improved 100 adsense clicks a day.

But FOR FUCKS SAKE, whilst my click count has trippled, my estimated CPC and hence, eCPM dropped 30%, leaving me no better off.

My efforts were in vain. Anyone else been experienced this slaughter or care to comment?

 

[aeiouy]

Perhaps you were smart priced because you traffic was not converting.

 

[RickStar]

Avoiding smart pricing

Perhaps you were smart priced because you traffic was not converting.

Sounds like that is indeed the case unfortunately. Would WickedFire be the place to discuss tactics to avoid being smart priced?

 

[Jdog]

Yeah, you can discuss it here, but the only way to really avoid smart pricing is to get a new account and make sure your traffic is targetted.

How many ads are you running per page on your site? Remember that the more ads you have the higher the chance that the cheap advertisers will show up to be clicked.

 

[RickStar]

Thanks Jdog from the city of sin Yeh, I'm only running 1 ad block with a CTR of 20%. So I'm guessing that's not the problem.

I hear from Jensense that our smart pricing index is reviewed weekly. What I'll do is try to get to a few "GOAL" pages from some a computers outside my network to see if that helps in a weeks time.

 

[RickStar]

BTW, my traffic is very targeted according to google as it naturally ranks me page #1 for my exact target. (an insurance type)

Additionally, I also have an insurance affiliate program running and it converts very well. Unfortunately, I'm still getting smart priced, hence my desire to get "un smart priced"

 

[Jdog]

I'll tell you what. I'll put my adsense code on your site for a week and then you can put yours back up after the smart pricing has worn off.

Deal?

Seriously though, you can wait it out, get another account (under a business or someone else's name) and use that, or take down your ads for a week and put something else in it's place.

 

[RickStar]

Jdog, yep. I'm going to take on your advice and get another account.

I actually have other sites using the same adsense account that could be effecting smart pricing factor. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[arz]

What kind of SEO stuff did you do? Did you add links to or from "bad neighborhoods"?

 

[Jdog]

Yeah, smartpricing affects the whole account. I had some myspace sites in the same account as my arbi sites and my $/click kept going down (like from $1 to $.15), so I moved the myspace crap to another account and turned off traffic for a week and everything was back to normal.

Good luck.