How To Get Worthless Adsense Clicks
January 2nd, 2008 by CourtWhen I started Court’s Internet Marketing School back in Feb. 2007, I planned on making money primarily with Adsense. I had already learned how to do it well, in fact I had already created my own portfolio of profitable sites that made great money with Adsense. I thought that creating a site about internet marketing would be another way to get Adsense clicks.
The main reason that this didn’t work is that you guys don’t click on ads. Yes, I’m probably talking to you since I know for a fact that less than 0.5% of you clicked on an ad during the last week I had Adsense on this site. Thanks for the support! (jk [sort of])
If you want to get absolutely worthless Adsense clicks, all you have to do is create a blog about blogging. It works like a charm and helps your entire Adsense account to generate worthless clicks.
Enter Adsense Smart-Pricing
When a site continues to get a terrible click-through rate (usually anything below 2%) Google will start to pay less commissions to the account that is producing the terrible CTR. Vic has written about this concept before, you can find that lesson here: Adsense and Noobs Bad Combination. As far as I know, Google hasn’t officially stated how much the commissions lessen, but I can tell you from experience that you will only get about 10% of what the clicks were worth if you get smart priced.
This means that a click that used to be worth $0.50 will be worth only $0.05 to you if you have been smart priced by Google. From one day to the next, my Adsense account started producing terrible numbers, in fact many of my great paying sites were all of the sudden generating clicks that were only worth two or three cents. Yes, if you are smart-priced it will affect every site in your account.
If you are running Adsense on a blog about blogging or making money online, chances are your account is already smart-priced. This means that any site you start will get terrible payouts for Adsense clicks. This may have led you to believe that Adsense is worthless, even though it’s still one of the best money makers out there.
How To Prevent Smart-Pricing
The easiest way to prevent smart-pricing is to remove Adsense from any of your sites that can’t produce at least a 3% CTR on ads. If you’re under 3% you’re in the danger zone and if you are getting a CTR of below 2% you have a red dot right between the eyes. Those of you that have blogs about blogging will definitely be in this category. Those of you that have sites that do well with social media may also be in this category. These sites aren’t going to be that great for Adsense and will probably hurt your entire Adsense account.
You want to use Adsense on sites that get most of their traffic from search engines. Keyword sniping is all about getting traffic from search engines because this is the traffic that will turn into the most Adsense clicks.
How To Reverse Smart-Pricing
Google uses smart-pricing to protect their advertisers from getting a bad CTR on the ads they pay for. It makes sense that they have to do this - it makes it so people will bid more on Adwords, which will increase your payouts on Adsense. Google is pretty fair with accounts that have been smart-priced, in fact it only takes about one week to undo the damage. What do you have to do to fix it? Remove Adsense from sites that don’t produce a 3% click-through rate.
When my account was smart-priced, I immediately removed the ads from CourtneyTuttle.com, and my full commissions were restored in about one week. I’ve had friends who have their full commissions restored even more quickly. You don’t have to ask Google or anything like that, this process happens automatically.
If you run a site that gets worthless Adsense clicks my advice to you would be to start a niche blog using keyword sniping techniques. Stay away from anything that webmasters and bloggers would read.
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January 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
Court the real crazy thing is even though their are a few post on the official adsense blog about smart pricing, Google really does not to talk about it kind of like sandbox. Even then on the post that talk about smart pricing the last thing they usually say is:
Reminds me of the FBI’s
LMAO
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:29 am
What? The sandbox exists?
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am
I have noticed this fluctation, where one day clicks are converting well and the next - nothing. Thanks for spelling it out.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
How ironic that the word I needed to type in to make this comment was “gold”…because it’s what I’m lacking
This post really hit home. I run a site: arizonasportsfans.com and I basically have adsense all over it and it gets like .04% CTR because it’s a forum and all.
I just compared that site to my main blog, AMikeLIfe.com and they are basically making the same amount of money each,but AML has a 2% CTR, and the other .04%…
I’m probably not making as much as I can on AML, and considering my traffic is just growing and growing on that one, I may need to look into take it down on the sports site.
Man, this stuff drives me crazy…thanks for the post.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Yeah Mike I don’t know what you’re making with arizonasportsfans.com but it sounds like you’re going to get smart priced for sure - if you haven’t already.
I would recommend taking Adsense off and using something else! If the traffic is there, you could go with direct ads or affiliate programs.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
The funny thing is Court, my sports blog seems to occasionally get .50, .75, even $1.00 clicks…while AMikeLife gets less…
Just interesting how it all works.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
hmmm.
Triggers trains of thought in me, as always with a Court’s post.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:58 am
so Court, what it be a good conclusion then that the less web and technology-savvy your average site visitor is, the more likely you’ll get higher click-thru ratios?
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Absolutely Jeff.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Thanks again for a wonderful tip. I did, indeed, think that Adsense was worthless, but I have it on a blog that’s dead, and a blog that does pretty well with social networking, and it’s my first blog (so it is a newbie blog).
I’m getting rid of adsense immediately, and I’ll set it up on my new keyword sniped site (I finally chose a keyword and bought a domain…I’ll report my findings if they’re worth reporting in a few months).
Theda K.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Fun Theda! I’m happy that you were able to find a good keyword and I’m looking forward to hearing about how you’re doing with it!
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Like I mentioned earlier, I managed to create this problem by putting Adsense on OpTempo. As you stated, I saw my Adsense income for December drop to about 15% of what it was in October/November.
What was weird was that I didn’t get “smart priced” until somewhere just after Thanksgiving although the ads had been on the site since day 1 (Oct 6). Of course this lines up with when I started using EntreCard so I have to wonder if the junk traffic from the widget dropped my CTR and led to the smart pricing.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
That would make perfect sense Frank. I bet you will be able to get your full commissions back in no time.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Good news! I started seeing $1+ clicks coming in to the previously affected sites this morning. They were 5 cents or less while I was smart priced.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Once again congratulations on writing such a great post, the old adage “less is more” sure rings true here. You have actually prompted me to go through my old “seo based” posts and do a serious AdSense cull! I expect i a have been smart priced as my average CTR is under 3% for the past 10 months! Just a couple of questions. Over what period of time do Google take your average CTR to calculate their smart pricing strategy? Days weeks or months? Also how doest this work for impression costed adverts do these also dilute your ctr?
Thanks again
Andy
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I wish I had that answers to those questions Andy! I went with less then 1% on a site for about two months before I got hit but I don’t think they have a set time limit.
It seems to me that it’s decided by the site-wide CTR of a site. You need to keep the site’s CTR as high as possible to avoid this.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Court–thanks for more insider info! I have some “Dead” blogs from free sites that I have since moved to my own hosted domains and I have left the Adsense on those dead blogs because they get some traffic…but never any clicks. THanks again for the superior content… I am very glad I subscribed to your email feed.
AL
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Ok, I really suck. My CTR on every one of my sites is under 2%. Will I make more with Adsense if I take it off of every one of my sites? LOL
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Lol Bruce I don’t think so. I would look at what channels you have that are performing well and keep them. You will also want to try different placements.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 pm
thanks for the heads up on this - i’m going to have to check the channels now and remove it from those sites that it doesn’t belong on.
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
This is a revelation to me. I will experiment and see whether what you’ve advised works. It sounds convincing
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Well, I guess I have to remove all the adsense in my blogspot blogs. I put many code in my blogspot blogs. Thanks for the info
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Court, you may not get adsense clicks from us, but if you truly showed us the tools you use to “make money” consistenty, I’ll bet many of your readers would buy (affiliate commissions to you
).
I know Vic strongly talks about BMD and other tools, and goes in detail on how to use them. This makes it a ‘no-brainer’ to buy it when your reader sees exactly how to benefit from it in real money making applications.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:54 pm
[…] That’s improvement #2. Adsense only works well in niche blogs, not in general-interest blogs. I have learned this from reading useful blogs on SEO, internet marketing, and money making. If your Adsense account is currently used in a general interest blog, remove it, wait for a few weeks and then use it in a niche blog. Doing so allows your account to no longer be smart priced. Court explains Smart-Pricing. […]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 am
I run an entertainment blog, one that contains almost everything from Hollywood gossip, software recommendations, funny videos, etc. and I´m earning almost $400.00 only with that blog…
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
And I have also seen that Adsense on IM sites - $4.54 in six months??? - just doesn’t work! LOL
But this smart-pricing stuff… That explains a lot of what I just couldn’t work out with wildly fluctuating results over the past 12 months!
On further investigation, it seems it has been happening for quite some time (late 2004 in fact) and like many, I haven’t been aware of the implications as a publisher!
So how to decide which sites to kill?
Well, thankfully I’ve been using channels to record data for different sites - even PARTS of sites - so it’s pretty easy to see which channels are not performing.
I’ve just looked at my channel stats for the past year, and then sorted by Page CTR. Now my job is to spend a few days removing those ads/channels that have:
1. earned less than $20 in the whole year, AND / OR
2. had a CTR under 3%
There are some exceptions to this rule. There’s one channel that has a CTR of 1.97% but it has earned $1700 for the year… and a couple of others like that - so they have to stay.
There are also a couple with high CTR’s but they’ve earned less than $20 so they will go.
BTW - the $20 is purely arbitrary… but if it ain’t earning 2 bucks a month… well…
If I change my report criteria, and remove the above channels (44 removed - 38 left in play), the end result is quite amazing when I run the report again for 2007 year.
Those 44 channels I killed resulted in a total loss of only 78k impressions (out of a total of 4.8m), meaning 650 less clicks (out of 171k), for a reduction of just $176 (out of $30k) for the whole year.
If this smart-pricing theory is correct, that’s a small price to pay for the potential increase in earnings I can get from killing those unproductive ad channels.
Fingers crossed
Stephen Spry
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I forgot to say that I’ve been meaning to monetize these low performing channels/sites with something else for some time.
It seems I now have the incentive to get cracking on it TODAY! LOL
Stephen
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Court - I would also like to know if it is possible to figure out what span of time the CTR is calculated on when determining smart pricing - a week, a month, a quarter?
My non-techie sites definitely do the best with Adsense. Time, traffic and the right topic seem to be the formula for success.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
It seems to be like it’s at least one month Char but if you’re in the danger zone you will want to correct it as quickly as possible!
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Very helpful one Court. I heard about that smart pricing but never know about that percentage and google restoring back the commission automatically. It is good to know that now.
In IM your have problem will have problem with your affiliate link
and adsense click. For adsense either you get get click fraud or no click at all. But just like you said if the traffic is coming from SE you will get the click.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thank you Court for this valuable information.
You are definitely a man of your word as each blog post written on this site provides enormous value.
It really is to the point whereby when I receive one of your blog post announcements, I make sure my environment is distraction free in order to take in what you have to say:)
Your integrity and strategic business advice is truly worth emulating.
To Your Continued Success.
January 4th, 2008 at 12:38 am
you can´t earn enough money with adsense. not really. maybe on of 1000 persons - but not more.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Thank you very much for your information. i have to follw your points
January 4th, 2008 at 9:00 am
[…] the earnings of the clicks on all of your other sites. You can read about smart pricing over at Court’s blog. To sum it up though, Google will devalue the clicks on your sites because of a low CTR. You want […]
January 4th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Combined with key word sniping about which you have given great advise, this should be cinch. Thanks.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I wasn’t even aware of smart pricing, until I read Vic and Griz talking about it in comments. As soon as I found out smart pricing existed, I suspected it had happened to me. Vic confirmed this for me. Thank-you for all of the well written useful information. I’m sure a lot of people aren’t aware that they have been smart priced.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
[…] know what smart pricing is you should probably read Courtney Tuttle’s great article How To Get Worthless AdSense Clicks. If one of your sites is smart priced then your entire account will be. In order to get the maximum […]
January 4th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Excellent post. I’d heard about smart pricing, but was never able to make sense of it. You laid it out beautifully. I’ll give it a try (sadly, for me, this means replacing AdSense on about a dozen sites…) and I’ll let ya know if it indeed makes a difference. Thanks!
January 4th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Well, I took Court’s advice yesterday and removed all the Google ads that were getting roughly a .04% CTR on my two websites.
I just kept a big 300×250 in my blog posts on A Mike Life and left it alone.
This morning I had 2 clicks worth about .25 cents. Ugly, but I suspected it would take awhile.
Well, this later afternoon, I got one more click worth $1.25…
Could it work this fast? Or was I just lucky? Cause my CTR is only .80%
January 4th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Hey Mike, I’ve been thinking about this too.
The more ads you have on your pages, then more low paying ads would appear more often.
If your only using your best performing ad block then it would make sense for they average price per click received would increase.
January 5th, 2008 at 3:35 am
[…] Tuttle wrote a good post titled How To Get Worthless Adsense Clicks. If you are looking for a clever way of increasing your Adsense income, then you should try what […]
January 5th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Since I changed the ad position in my blog (Planet Apex) to inside the post my CTR is now averaging around 5-6 for the last month or so. But my previous CTR track was horrible. I had under 2 or even 1 for a long time.
Now my overall CTR avg. is incrising and today I saw my account and it has just passed 3% mark.
However my earning are still not good. Yesterday I got
22 clicks from 300+ pageviews and only 2.10$ for a CTR of 7 or so. Do you think I’m still smart prices Court? Or am I doing something else wrong?
January 5th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Court, thanks for writing this article. I’ve been following you, Vic (Blogger Unleased) and GrizzlyBear of late and I’m getting a lot of what you are saying.
I have personally experienced “smart pricing” as you and Vic have both described it, so I’ve yanked Adsense off of my blogs. Time will tell if/when I’ll try it again.
Keep up the good work! Also getting a lot of good insights out of your keyword sniping articles!
January 6th, 2008 at 6:36 am
I see that a lot of people subscribe to the ‘adsense=nonsense’ idea
January 6th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I’m still messing with mine, a bit discouraging to start with, because even though I only got .04% with my forums, I still could make $2-3 a day…while now with them only on my lower traffic blog, I’m making $1 or less.
But…I think the more it grows, the better it will be, plus I’m going to repositioned my 300×250 block to be in the top left of all blog posts, so hopefully that helps.
January 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I found exactly this on one of my sites and was puzzled as to why. Now you have explained it i know what to do. More great advice, thanks. I find this site invaluable for seo tips etc.
January 6th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
[…] How To Get Worthless Adsense Clicks If you’re running a website targeted towards webmasters, your click-through rate can be insanely low. Webmasters simply do not like to click on ads. Many people don’t know this, but it can adversely affect your Adsense payouts. Courtney Tuttle describes the negative effects of smart pricing and how you can avoid it to make the most money possible. […]
January 8th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Very interesting, informative and insightful article! =) Being able to regulate one’s Internet Marketing earnings from Google Adsense is something few people know. Thanks so much for the sharing.
There is more and more talk in the market that the “Adsense game is over”, such that many people are aggressively giving up the many domain names and websites they used to own to monetize through Adsense, such that Adsense has become a game viable only to the “Big Boys”, like article directories, huge information portals, etc.
I would also recommend learning excellent stuff about marketing on the Internet for FREE from the Internet Marketing School. For a PAID subscription, the exciting and value-overloaded World Internet Academy is a fantastic choice!
January 9th, 2008 at 7:33 am
[…] many people have heard about Adsense Smart Pricing and there’s little information about it. It appears that if you have a low CTR (under 1 or […]
January 9th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
[…] Courtney Tuttle writes about Adsense smart pricing. If you are displaying Adsense on a site that doesn’t have a higher click through rate (CTR) than 3%, you are at risk of having Smart Pricing applied to your Adsense commission. Smart Pricing is a system that Google use to ensure good value for their advertisers. It is estimated that your Adsense commission can be reduced by up to 90% if you are in the smart pricing category, so if a click paid out 40c to a normal user, it will pay out 4c to a user who has been smart priced. […]
January 11th, 2008 at 4:01 am
[…] week I ran across a post over at Courtney Tuttle’s blog titled how to get worthless AdSense clicks, which caused me to re-evaluate how I approach trying to make money with Google AdSense. In this […]
January 12th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
I’m new to blogging and really enjoyed viewing your blog.
January 13th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
[…] Read the fill post here: How To Get Worthless Adsense Clicks […]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:41 am
[…] was based on Courtney Tuttle’s recent explanation of Adsense Smart Pricing. The theory is that having a low CTR (below 1 or 2%) will result in a penalty, so you only receive […]
January 15th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Court,
Great post, but I don’t think it’s CTR which is the problem - I think it’s advertiser conversion rate. That’s based on an ancient post by Google:
That’s more than two years old, so what they say might have changed, but I think it’s more likely that Smart Pricing would be based on advertiser conversion rate than CTR (as it’s really about value for the advertiser).
Anyway, it probably doesn’t make a big difference, because there’d be a high correlation between high CTR and high advertiser conversion rate, because both are a product of targeted traffic.
The point is, for those people with a low CTR: don’t just pull Adsense off your blog - do some testing to see if you are smart priced, or you may be leaving money on the table. I’m fairly confident I’m not smart priced even though my CTR is below 0.2%.
Court - you have a lot more experience with this than me, so please put me in my place if I’m wrong!