Adsense Smart Pricing test

I noticed a while back that when I accidentally left AdSense off one of my high traffic sites for a couple of days, the actual revenues seemed barely affected.

I put this down to a lucky fluke and quickly re-added the Adsense.

I’ve also noticed that earnings will apparently start the day with high payments per click - then become significantly lower in the day. I figured this was simply due to the more careful Adwords advertisers taking control of the ads.

However, via MyBlog Log I noticed a post - more than a year old - from Jen Sleg, which happens to describe Smart Pricing.

I was never aware that Smart Pricing was being applied to AdSense accounts, and suddenly my previous observations make some sense.

My immediate reaction was anger - if what I suspect is true, then what it means is that higher traffic sites are being penalised to earn less per click than lower traffic sites.

And the irony is that as lower traffic sites tend to be lower quality, it also means splogs and similar sites are being rewarded with higher payments.

While the original claim is that sites with a lower conversion rate offer less value for advertisers, IMO this is utterly not true - it’s precisely because the higher traffic sites offer much better quality for visitors, and even provide fewer - but better quality - leads.

The reality is that it could reward Google - by reducing the size of payments it has to make to the high traffic sites using Adsense, it should be able to make significant savings.

So I’m testing this out at present by removing AdSense from a forum with 120k unique visitors per month. Normally it accounts for around 35% of my Adsense earnings, but if Smart Pricing is still playing any significant role, the overall loss of income should be much less than 35%.

The frustration is that YPN - the only viable Adsense alternative - is only available for US publishers.

So if this experiment goes as expected above, it means removing high traffic sites will help improve Adsense income. But then the problem is - how else do I monetise them?

ADDED: To help track the issue, I’ve set up Adsense on the high traffic site using a second company. Will be interesting to see how the stats overall compare over at least one week.

ADDED 2: Asking at DigitalPoint has brought some interesting responses about Smart Pricing - the main one being that Smart Pricing applies not to clickthrough rates but conversion rates. For the time being I’m cancelling my test because the past few days have shown little change in earnings with both accounts combined, so I figure that means I’ve not become subject to Smart Pricing for Adsense - not at present, anyway.