Posted in Adsense, Allowed Sites, ctr, Google, smart pricing | 15 Comments
Oh No – Unauthorized Sites Are Displaying My Ads!
Is My AdSense Being Smart Priced?
Ever since I read that Grizzly had doubled his income by eliminating Smart Pricing from his AdSense, I decided it was well worth my while to see if I had been smart priced too.
In case you don’t know, AdSense’s Smart Pricing is when AdSense reduces the price it pays you per click, based on some not totally understood method which takes into account how well your site’s traffic converts for the advertiser. Some people think it is based on click-through-rate (CTR), but this is not true.
It just happens that sites with low CTR on their ads are usually the same ones whose readers do not convert well for the AdSense advertisers. This is probably because it is not targeted traffic.
Anyway, one way to see if you are being smart priced is to take AdSense off sites that you suspect are not performing well, and see if the rest of your sites perform better. Of course, it is a guessing game as to which sites are the culprits, so you have to do some trial and error.
Being lazy, I did not want to keep taking AdSense off and putting AdSense back on my sites. But not to fear, Google has a solution for this problem.
Allowed Sites for AdSense
Under “AdSense Setup” in your AdSense account, you will find a section called “Allowed Sites”. All you have to do is put the sites in there that you would like to be counted for AdSense. The ads will still stay on the other sites, but you just will not get paid for the clicks for any sites you do not list. And you will not get smart priced for any sites not on your “Allowed Sites” list.
This way, you can test which sites might be getting you smart priced without all the bother of actually removing the AdSense from sites.
I have not yet found out if I am being smart priced. So far, I am still earning the same amount per click. Except for the first day I set up my “Allowed Sites”, I saw an increased price per click. By the next day, it was back to normal. So maybe when you first set up your “Allowed Sites”, they reset your account not to be smart priced. I’m not sure, because it was so fleeting a thing that it could be just a fluke.
Unauthorized Sites
But I did find out something interesting. When you set up your “Allowed Sites”, once a week, Google will report on any sites which are showing your ads that are not on your “Allowed Sites” list.
Besides the sites I expected (my own sites), this week I saw these sites:
cache.search.yahoo.net
64.233.179.104
209.85.171.104
images.search.yahoo.com
209.85.175.104
66.196.80.202
images.google.com.my
images.google.com.ph
uk.images.search.yahoo.com
So, my ads are displaying on cached pages and image search, among others. These Unauthorized Sites could be affecting your pricing!
Try This
Especially for image search, the visitors may not be that targeted, and could trigger smart pricing. So, it might be worth your while to go into the “Allowed Sites” page in your AdSense account, and just list the sites you expect AdSense to be on. This will eliminate the weird sites such as those above from counting against you in your AdSense pricing.
Besides, you can see if anyone is messing with you by displaying your AdSense on their sites!
P.S. You can thank Darren at ProBlogger for inspiring the title to this post.
- Pat Doyle
Wow, this come sunder the ‘headslapper’ category for me, Pat. I read about this in the past on Darren’s blog and I ‘knew’ the option was there, but I just didn’t realize how valuable the service might be.
Over the year I have been using AdSense I suspect there are several places I might still have ads ‘up’ on poorperforming sites. yes, I know, you should always keep track of such things, etc., etc. I should lose weight and grow hair too, but neither one is likely to happen.
I just went and restricted my list to the sites I am trying to make money with today and we shall see … if nothing else it at least is something concrete toward increasing income and improving management, and you cna’t do something like that with just a few keystrokes on most days. Thanks.
Dave, I know what you mean. There are always things we “should” do, but sometimes we need a little incentive to actually do them.
I found your site because of the problogger contest,,,I added you to a list of my favorites from the contest on my blog.
I like your post!
I think the Smart Pricing is a myth.
I have sites with high traffic that have low per-click income but they make comparable income to low traffic sites that have high per-click income.
If I remove the low paying click site, I would lose some good money.
I do believe that you can get your site attracting only low paying Ads, but in my case it does not seem to affect the others unless you are thinking that $1 a click is low which I don’t.
If Smart Pricing exists, how do you spot it, does your maximum eCPM per site top out at under $5 or what?
My eCPM varies over a range of 50:1
Your idea of spotting Black Hatters hosting your Ads is intriguing though.
Andy
Andy, if you are Smart Priced, it will affect all your sites. Some sites will naturally have low click income because it is not a high-paying topic. Smart Pricing means that you are getting less per click than you could be because your visitors are not converting well for the advertisers. The problem is that Smart Pricing affects your entire AdSense account, even if only one of your sites is the cause of it.
I don’t know how to spot it for sure, other than to eliminate a site that you suspect of being a problem (by taking AdSense off of it or eliminating it from your list of allowed sites). Then you need to wait a week or so and see if your other sites’ earnings improve.
My comment about black hatters hosting your ads was supposed to be a joke.
I don’t know why anyone would bother to do this. It would not be of any advantage to them.
I don’t use adsense right now, but I did like the title.
Good luck.
Saw you in Problogger killer titles. you can check out mine if you wish.
This is very interesting question. I have some bad experience, adSense smart pricing definitely isn’t myth, and believe me, I advice you to do what Pat says here. I have steady growing incomes for past few years, increasing for few percents every month,blah,blah,blah (etc) Few months ago, earnings dropped, I mean this is just this week, then thought this month, but it takes 2 months, I looking for on forums, blogs discussed with people and some of them pointing me to smart pricing, I check every of my xx sites and blog and everything seems ok, so I start to be depresed
Well not literaly but You understand what I am mean 
Then I got one idea: for example what would be happen if someone put on some very very crappy site but with very large traffic (also crapy, untargeted but MASSIVE traffic) adsense with my adsense ID (pub-etcxxx) ?
Well, this come to my mind because I look everywhere and solution was just in front of my eyes, number of impressions in my google account, for example was :10 000, and when I manual count for each channel it was for example 7 000, so what are those 3 000 impressions daily, and why my average click drop from 5-20 times? After tha I ‘came out’ from ‘depression’ and used adsense allow filter, and after few days stuffs come back in normal.
Now conclusion who and why would do something like that? Well just use imagination. Is that way to bury some competition which targets for example similar keywords in SEO? Pretty sure … You will tell “OK, but competition can beat your position in google!” I agree with you, but can make you to “fail in depression” stop work on your site(s) or blog(s) which will result natural for your competition to beat you in seo on given keyword and…what happends then we all know.
So, google don’t give us “usefulness” stuffs, and this tool/filter is there because it need to be there and have own purpose.
Conclusion number 2: Don’t think to much, just belive in Pat advice and do that-use adsense allow sites filter.
P.S. Pat, I like your blog, I think that I will coming here more often.
Home Money Maker, thanks for your comment. I am kind of surprised that someone would actually do this, but I guess there are all kinds of black-hat people out there. I am glad you got your pricing back to normal. Thanks for giving us a real-life example of this.
Thanks for replay Pat! Also,as you said that You are surprised that somone doing this,well imagine that You are number one on keyword “Pat Doyle” which lets image pays few bucks per click.I am number 2 on google on “Pat doyle” keyword, and as we know since you are number one and I am number 2 we don’t share 50-50 all let say 200 000 queries monthly, in reality you will get 80%-85% and I will get maybe 10% of traffic on this query, and what is good solution? To compromise your pub-id on way that I described, your profits dramatically going down, after few weeks or months you are tired and stop or slow adding content and promoting site,and I am working all time on my site which is number 2, and after some time we are switched you are number 2 and I am number one and I am now taking those 80-85% of traffi for Pat Doyle for which we said that brings 200 000 queries, now just to simple calculations with average CTR, CPC for some real keyword that pay no more than $1 and I think that stuffs will be pretty clear.
I was amazed when found service which works on this way: You give them URL of some webmaster who is using adSense on site and pay them and they replay with list of all sites for that person owns. And they are not cheap at all. I was think “Why should someone pay to know which sites somone other have?” This inspired me to research what kind of “combinations” can do black hat related people… That is interested story and I will publish in one of my blogs related to this subject, and will inform you here so you and others can read more about that…Thats all from me for now.
Also,like I said I like your blog so I subscribed to your rss…
Your post is one of those posts which makes me realize that if you just think hard about some of this stuff – ie, why do things work as they do, what could I do differently to change the outcome … that I should be able to come up with a lot of the information on my own about what is needed to improve my sites, ranking etc. Don’t get me wrong, reading sites like yours, and especially griz’s blog are what have given me a huge base of information to get started down the right path. I just wanted to say thanks for posting your analysis of the smart-pricing issue … like I said it helps me realize that there are times when I could probably skip a lot of the time I spend searching for answers, and instead just think things through.
Verizon, I think you’re on the right track. Sometimes you can read a lot of contradictory information. It’s good to think things through for yourself, and even better to test things to see what works.
Hi Pat,
Anyway, thanks again for the post, and good luck with your site(s).
I just stumbled across your blog, and really got a lot from your post. I agree with Verizon, it made me think that there is a lot you can learn on your own. But that doesn’t mean I’ll give up reading Griz’s sites.
Actually these are the sites that have been used by the supporting IP’s to gather and crawl the content for their functioning.
i have written a post over this on my blog over it http://colorsofnet.com/unauthorized-sites-that-might-have-used-your-adsense/
Gaurav, thanks for the info! I read your post, and that is really interesting.
I’ve tried to make sense of all of the Adsense policies and whatnot, but wow, there’s just so much to keep track of. How do you do it?