At the last AdSense webinar, one issue that barely raised its head above the parapet was Smart Pricing. It was mentioned. But little more than that. Thats a shame because Smart Pricing is probably the most underrated issue concerning AdSense. Few factors have greater influences on our earnings... and few are as tough to track or as hard to control. Dont get me wrong though. I love the idea behind Smart Pricing. My income is dependent on advertisers turning the traffic I send them into profits. If they cant do that theyre going to stop advertising and Im going to lose my income. Smart Pricing means that its much easier for them to make a profit. Thats good news for all of us... even those of us who have seen our earnings fall but cant seem to figure out the reason why. When I was updating my AdSense book, I put a lot of thought into what Smart Pricing means for AdSense publishers and how we can take advantage of it, or at the very least, protect our prices. I did produce a few ideas, but I always came up against the same problem: I cant see the conversion rate that my traffic gives advertisers. Once one of my visitors clicks an ad and leaves my site, hes gone. Ill get the money, and Im happy for that, but Ive got no idea what he does after he leaves my site. If I did know what he was doing -- and found that he became a customer -- I could trace where he came from and buy some more traffic from that same source. If I could find a source that gave consistently high sales to advertisers who pick up on my keywords, my Smart Pricing would stay safe and high. But I cant do that. Or at least I cant do it for standard Ad Units. The best I can do for these ads is to build good content, keep bringing in good traffic and hope for the best. But when I pick up an ad campaign through the Advertise On This Site feature, I can contact the advertiser and I can keep in touch with him. Presumably then, I could also ask for details on the visitors who parted with their cash. Maybe I could ask for their IP addresses... That would let me track back to see where they came from and identify who sent them to me. Pretty soon, Id know which traffic sources werent just sending me the most clicks but also the most conversions. That would make me about smarter about Smart Pricing. |
