AdSense Issues Verification and Income

Time to catch up on some issues with AdSense. Those with accounts who haven't yet been through the verification process on their accounts will notice that Google has changed the trigger level for sending out PIN's.

Google has two ways to check that the physical address given for the AdSense account is correct. The first is that they send out a PIN in a postcard to the address which then has to be verified back into the account. The second is telephoning the phone number given in the account. Google used to send out the PIN once the AdSense account had accrued $50 but this has been dropped to $10 so new AdSense users will go through this verification process much sooner than previous sign ups did.

A more significant issue with AdSense is the fact that there appear to be many users reporting drops in their AdSense income over the last month or so. There is speculation that this may be due to Smartpricing which reduces the cost per click and is linked to the quality of clicks. Some AdSense users have experimented with reducing their AdSense exposure to try to deal with this.

Typically these were publishers who were deploying AdSense across a range of sites of varying quality. What they have been doing is removing the ADSense from the lower quality sites. Smartpricing is account wide not site targeted so increasing the average quality of clicks ( ie user actions ) should possibly counteract SmartPricing. Although these publishers may get fewer clicks as a result the payment per click should go up on the the quality sites that the AdSense is left on. This should more than compensate - or so the theory goes. I havent yet seen definitive evidence that this aproach works though.