Adsense Smart Pricing Explained

Smart Pricing is an attempt by Google to give Advertisers value for money and to guard against click fraud. One of the dangers of Adsense is that publishers set up temporary, trashy and/or un-authoritative pages of content on topics that they know attract high paying ads. Clicks on such pages (whether fraudulent or not) are not really good value for advertisers.

Smart Pricing sets a click value for each ad clicked based upon a variety of factors – none of which have been made public. There has been much speculation by publishers about what these factors might include – guesses as to what is included that I’ve seen in forums include:

• site relevance (ie is the whole site dedicated to a topic or just one page?)
• Impressions (is the site well trafficked – which could indicated authority)
• site size
• Page Rank (another indicator of authority)
• Age of site (some believe that click values go up over time once Google determines whether your site is in it for the long haul)
• Inbound Link Relevancy (if lots of other sites link to you with the keywords relevant to your content – and the ads)
• CTR