A number of months ago it was revealed that if you use AdSense on multiple sites all from one AdSense account that the performance of one blog can impact the way AdSense converts on another blog. Up until this point it was thought that ‘Smart Pricing’ was on a site by site (or even page by page) basis but this news caused quite a stir.
Here were the main points from that previous post (NB: This part of that post was actually a quote from this post by Jen from Jensense):
- “Smart pricing affects an entire account. It is not on a per page or per site basis.
- One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one.
- Smart pricing is evaluated each week. So removing ads from sites you suspect are converting poorly could result in seeing an adjustment to a higher smart pricing percent in as little as a week.
- Smart pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so you could be rewarded for new conversions that saw the initial click from your site up to 29 days earlier.”
One of the implications of this news was that a number of bloggers that I have contact with decided to set up multiple AdSense accounts – one to run their more highly converting blogs and others to run their poorer sites.
Today I received an email from a ProBlogger reader who did just this. In it he reports the results of this strategy. I’ve republished part of his email below (with permission and removing his name). The results of his experiment are VERY interesting:
Just thought I’d mention a AdSense revenue strategy that I implemented on the first of the month that instantly turned out to be one of those $10,000 hours you’ve posted about before.
Because I’ve got a couple of different company structures set up I thought I’d take advantage of it to get a second Google AdSense account which would allow me to better report which company earns which revenue in case I want to sell one or the other company as a whole in the future. It would also give me the chance to test the AdSense smart pricing system. Note: I did get the ok for this from Google before applying for the second account.
I moved all of my junk sites (what I call my high traffic but low revenue sites) to the second account and in my original account kept solely my high earning premium sites where I devote most of my time and which account for 90% of my earnings.
Anyway after nearly a full four weeks of data the revenue on my premium sites is up 15% and the revenue on my junk sites is down by only 3%. In monetary terms that means the net gain over the year at current levels will be at least $20,000 but if growth continues at the current rate it could be as high as $50,000. Took me about 30 minutes to make the move yet now it looks like I can either double my yearly motage re-payments or buy a second property with the extra funds. Only downside in watching the instant revenue increase has been my regret that I didn’t make the move sooner.
Note: I’ve talked to AdSense reps in the past about whether they allow multiple accounts per publisher and their response has always been that in general it is not allowed. However they do seem to make exceptions to this if you have corresponding company details or have a different person’s name as the one responsible for the account. It’s worth keeping in mind that AdSense do seem to track the IP addresses of people logging into accounts (it’s one way they track click fraud) so it might be worth seeking their permission before going with multiple accounts.
