What Else Do We Know About Smart Pricing

13.2 What Else Do We Know About Smart Pricing?

What Google has told us about Smart Pricing isn’t much. It also raises at least as many questions as it answers: How does Google judge the quality of an ad? How can they tell the role an ad plays in a marketing campaign? What are the other “advertiser fluctuations”? And perhaps most importantly, how do they track the results of the clicks?

All of those pieces of information would be very useful to a publisher. But Google wasn’t letting on.

Fortunately, publishers caught a break. Jennifer Sleg, the author of an excellent contextual advertising blog at www.Jensense.com, (you should definitely make this site a part of your regular reading) was contacted by an advertiser who was being tempted back from Yahoo! to Google. He told Jen what the AdSense salesman had told him about Smart Pricing. She told us.

This is what it boiled down to:

Smart Pricing is calculated across an AdSense account.

So if you have a number of different sites covering a range of different topics and one of them delivers a low ROI, all of your ad prices may be lowered.

Smart Pricing is evaluated weekly.

If you believe that an ad is delivering a low ROI, you can remove it from your site and you should see higher ad prices within a week.

Smart pricing is tracked with a 30-day cookie.

Users don’t have to convert immediately into a sale (or whatever will count as a conversion) for you to benefit. They can think about it for a month and you’ll still get the benefit.

Image ads are affected by smart pricing.

Few serious publishers use image ads except when they’re receiving CPM campaigns. Was this a reference to ads in low locations receiving lower rates?

Prices may be reduced even below an advertiser’s minimum bid.

So looking up the bid prices for targeted keywords won’t help you very much; if your ROI is low, your rates could be lower than the minimum quoted.

Conversions accounts are tracked by advertisers opting into AdWords Conversion Tracking.

But we still don’t know what Google is tracking or how it’s makingcalculations with its results.