If you are a publisher, you may have discovered you are earning less due to smart pricing. Many publishers feel content sites are effectively being punished by Google – simply for offering valuable content.   These same publishers are looking for ways to get rid of smart pricing – but you can really only get around smart pricing by blocking sites that do not convert well. This is done through your AdSense control panel at Google.

To determine which sites are converting well, and which ones are not, watch your Google AdSense stats carefully.  You will also want to check your AdWords account, so you can get an accurate idea of what keywords are going for - from an advertiser’s point of view.  Copy the URL of the sites that are appearing on your website, and use GoogSpy to find out what keywords those sites are bidding on. Then, using Google’s keyword tools, figure out what that keyword should be costing advertisers – or earning for you.

Remember Google takes money off the top and gives you a percentage.   Google doesn't like to talk about how much of a percentage they give to publishers, but reports have indicated 78% all the way down to 50% (how's that for a range?).  But if the keyword bid for an advertisers is considerably higher than what you are seeing on your AdSense reports, and  you believe you are being priced down due to Smart Pricing, try blocking that domain's ad from your site. Watch your stats again to see if you are doing any better. If you are a publisher, this is how to remove Google AdWords smart pricing.

You should note, however, that Google claims that publishers will do just as well or better with the smart pricing in effect, due to the fact that smart pricing brings more advertisers into the AdWords program. They advise against blocking these low converting websites.

First, if you are an advertiser, you may not want to work around smart pricing. Smart pricing is an automatic feature of AdWords that automatically reduces the cost of a click based on several different factors. For instance, if the data that Google has gives an indication that the click will not convert to a sale or a registration at your site, the click may cost less. There are other factors used to determine the cost of the click with smart pricing as well.

If an advertiser does not wish to have the smart pricing feature, the only real way around it is to turn off the option to have your ad appear across the Google network of sites, and keep your ads from appearing on sites other than Google by disabling the content bids feature. This will prevent your site from showing on anything other than search result pages in Google – and since Google is sure that you will convert well from their site, the smart pricing will not occur, you will be charged the full price for the click, and the publisher (Google) will earn the full amount of the click.

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