How does Adsense performance differ when you change publisher ID?

[Clinton]

Whenever you buy a site monetised with Adsense and change the Adsense publisher ID, is there's an Adwords type effect?

In Adwords, of course, a campaign performs differently under a new owner even if the keywords, ads, landing page etc., are exactly the same. It's accepted that the quality of the account can affect your PPC costs.

What's not so clear is if that happens in Adsense as well. What are your experiences? Do you see any sudden variation in CTR or EPC just from changing the publisher ID?

(Adsense ex-employees - you know who you are - feel free to chip in with opinion if you want )

[hooperman]

Funny you should ask this as I changed publisher IDs round about 10th March last month. I transferred 3 high performing sites to the new account and they started performing better!

Oddly, so did the ones that remained in the original account.

[petertdavis]

Smart Pricing

[benitez17]

This is why I generally stay away from buying Adsense sites. I recently bought a site that was making about $5 per day for the previous owner via Adsense, and I am getting $0.01 per click consistently over the last few weeks. Fortunately the site has a few other revenue streams, plus I have a few ad networks that I can put in place of Adsense that perform pretty well.

[hooperman]

Smart Pricing

Let's say I hide my Adsense with CSS so the impressions remains the same but there are no clicks. CTR is then 0. Will that affect the advertisers who advertise on my site using Adsense?

[kmander]

Pete is correct - smart pricing effects the potential earnings from all the sites on a given account. Smart pricing, in a nutshell, is a way of comparing the value of the traffic that your sites generate versus other sites (as measured by conversion rates).

It really shouldn't an issue. I can't speak about the inner workings of smart pricing, frankly I don't know, but I'm aware that it's more of something to discount bad converting publishers than reward good ones - so providing your account is in good standing, transferring a site into your account won't see its earning performance drop.

I wouldn't be hiding your implementation with CSS - this will get you in trouble. CPM advertisers will be ripped off.

** to make it doubly clear - the above is my opinion only. **

[Freeman1974]

I bought a site early in the month and the previous owner (who i still speak to on a daily basis) very proudly told me that the site makes £50-60 each month just from adsense (thats not the main income generator btw).

I have not made a single change to the site apart from switch hes adsense to mine and within the 1st 3 weeks of ownership its already made me £110 just through adsense - go figure???

[Clinton]

Good point about the CPM advertisers.

Peter and Keith, when did smart pricing become an account wide issue? (Though there've always been rumblings/suspicions about it affecting a whole account). If it isn't a function of the account then smart pricing itself should have no effect on a site moving from one account to another, should it?

All Google's initial descriptions of SP were about how individual sites converted for the advertiser if I remember right.

[petertdavis]

Smart Pricing has been around for years. Maybe 2006 or so when it started being noticed.

[kmander]

I think you'll find it's at an account level.