A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is possible for a competitor to get your AdSense account "smart priced." By smart priced, the folks in the thread mean, that your average daily Page eCPM drops, and your earnings are seriously impacted.
How would a competitor make your earnings drop? This individual suspects that if someone is capable of seriously impacting your AdSense impressions and clicks, Google will take notice. So if you average 100 clicks with 10,000 impressions and all of a sudden you see 5,000 clicks with 11,000 impressions - that may raise a red flag.
The suspicion is that Google has automated the smart pricing algorithm to be very sensitive about activity like that. The AdSense publisher said:
In any case, it looks as if the smartpricing algo is much too sensitive. The previous week had CTR and eCPM the same every day +/- 1% (as had the previous months). An entire week or month should determine smartpricing, not one or two hours. Obviously two hours doesn't provide enough accurate and reliable data to draw a reasonable conclusion about site performance.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
