I’ve Been Smart Priced; Now Looking For New PPC Program
I’m not sure how much longer I can make money online if I play Google’s cat and mouse game where I bend over backwards, jump through hoops, run in circles, and still get spit on at the finish line. The past few days (and other days too) I’ve been receiving unreasonably low clicks on my pages and I can only assume it’s because I’ve been smart priced. What is smart pricing you ask? Here are the words straight from the horse (see: cite):
How smart pricing works
We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of clicks and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis. With improved smart pricing, you should automatically get greater value for clicks from ad impressions across our network, all with no change in how you bid.
So basically if Google decides your clicks aren’t making the difference for advertisers, they can decide to pay you less. This decision wreaks of an outfit that has way too much power. There are so many things wrong with this type of Orwellian decision that I’m going to list them.
1. Google never discloses how they decide when clicks aren’t converting and really how would they know besides getting full disclosure data from a large sample of advertisers? The cloak here is Google decides you have a spammy site and tosses you a few pennies just because they deem your site unworthy.
2. Even if Google got all the market research in the world from every single Adwords user, who is to say whether they are going to be completely accurate in their surveys. In other words, why would advertisers trumpet oh everything is converting at 85% thank you so much Google when they could say yeah we did pretty good but we need a little more of that smart pricing, our conversions weren’t as hot as we’d thought they’d be? It just doesn’t add up.
3. A lot of advertisers can’t convert their landing page anyways. Even if we assume Google knows everything in the world and can magically know what is converting and what is not converting, it’s fundamentally unfair to put the onus on publishers. Just because Bobby Joe wants to play with the big boys and bids $3.00 a click for his new “make money online” program that nobody would ever buy, how is it fair that I bear the burden of Bobby Joe’s sucky website?
4. Google says they discount the clicks but because they’re so secretive, how does anybody really know how much they keep and how much they give back. Sure they can give back some, but they could also make a tidy profit in the whole transaction – it’s up to them. The advertiser has already set their bid so any money back is a bonus. The publisher doesn’t know how much Google pays because they never say. Google makes all the decisions and has all the money. Whose to say that when Google decides I’m giving off a spammy click and smart prices me that they don’t get a windfall? This is a huge problem and unlike some people, I don’t have blind trust in Google. Folks, whenever a situation comes up where one party holds all the money and has all the discretion to say how much you receive for your services, then there is a mega problem. This is the very same as if you went to work at McDonald’s and at the end of your 40 hour week, McDonald’s decided how much they would pay you in the name of customer satisfaction and calculated your pay based on their top secret “smart compensation” formula that only they could know about. Would you take $15 for 40 hours of work just because that’s what McDonald’s said you should make? Hell no, you’d quit and sue them.
5. If you have one website that is being “smart priced” (read: ravaged by Google), then your entire Google Adsense account is penalized and it’s up to you to figure out what went wrong. Basically you have to play a guessing game and decide where the “smart priced” website is at and take it off Adsense. WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD GOOGLE DO THIS? Think about it, if Google is so damn smart and concerned with efficiency, why can’t they just put a little asterick next to the website that has been flagged or just send you an auto notice in your Adsense account so you can go remedy the problem right away? Instead they let you play a guessing game amongst all of your websites to see if you can guess and check your way back into their good graces.
Obviously, I’m none to happy about this. I hadn’t heard about smart pricing until I read Grizzly’s blog but I knew I had been shafted before on Adsense in some way or another. At first, I was naive and just I was receiving really low clicks and didn’t put much stock in it because I wasn’t aggressively pursuing Adsense, but because my efforts have turned solely to monetizing with Adsense as of late, I started digging deeper and realized my rediculously cheap clicks were a result of Google’s efforts to play the role of a deity and decide what shall be right and what shall be wrong. This has gone too far… too far.
And you know what, the choice is mine. This is an open market and it is time for me to engage in smart selecting. Google has slapped me around a ton and it’s time to say enough is enough. I’ll tell you one more thing, I don’t care what they say, when my sites get more clicks the price per click goes down.
With the aforementioned in head, I’ve hit up the Yahoo Publisher Network (“YPN”) and the Microsoft PubCenter both today looking for another, more fundamentally fair way to publish PPC ads. My application is pending with Microsoft. I could never fill out a form with Yahoo because it couldn’t load the application. I do have an account with Chitika but wasn’t impressed with my payouts or click through rate (“CTR”) so I dropped them, but may have to consider a return.
Google Adsense remains on most of my websites for now, but if I can find a more steady, reliable alternative I’ll dump Google in a second. From the reviews I’ve read, both MSN and Yahoo pay much better than Google but neither convert as well. That’s ok as long as when someone makes a $4 click I don’t get a 7 cent deposit. Google has done a lot of great stuff, but I simply can’t afford to have all of my sites docked because they arbitrarily decide clicks on one of my sites aren’t worthy.
I have mostly informative sites with good information (typically 1,000+ words) on blog platforms with 1 adsense block apiece. If I deliver the click, I expect to get a fair shake, not a nickle in a niche that has an average CPC of $2.88. If Google is going to insult me with penny clicks, I’m going to have to find another way to make money online.
PS If you read the entry below this one, you may wonder what I’m complaining about but most of my success has been generated from one site (and even at that I’m getting $2.50 for a supposedly $14.00 average CPC judging by Adwords Keywords) and over the last several days, I’ve had several clicks at embarrassingly low payouts for lucrative keywords.
