I was adding a comment to my post asking for advice on Google Adsense Smart Pricing that was getting so long I decided to turn it into a post.
I can’t believe that I hadn’t considered Google Adsense Smart Pricing before. This is where Google Adsense will serve lower priced adverts on sites that have poor CTRs, and higher priced adverts on sites that have high CTRs. This calculation is done across a whole Adsense account, not on a site by site basis.
I guess from Google’s perspective this makes sense as if an ad that has a high CPC is displayed on a site but doesn’t get clicked on, then because this will result in poor performing results for their advertising partners who they want to keep happy as well as their publishers, then they won’t serve those ads on that site again and instead will show ads from ‘less important’ advertisers with cheaper ads.
What does this mean for your blog? Well, by having ads displayed in poorly performing locations either on a poorly performing site or in a poorly performing ad slot, then this will only result in cheaper ads being displayed on average across all your sites.
Armed with this new knowledge, I’m going to remove some of my ads where I’m only displaying an ad because there’s a ‘blank space’, so that (hopefully) across my Google Adsense account my average CTR will increase, which should hopefully mean that I get more higher priced ads because Google sees my site as a good place to serve better ads.
I’m going to monitor the results for a few months to see if the average eCPM for my better performing ad units increases as a result. Hopefully, this will ofset the loss of earnings from removing the poorly performing units.
Let me know if you made/plan to make a similar change and if it improves your Adsense earnings.
