As some of you have probably noticed, Blogger’s layout has changed a little since we last updated our FAQ’s. This post will be helpful to those of you new to Chitika and/or Blogger.
We’re excited to share with all of you our most recent development: Pay Per Call Ads!
Up until now, Chitika ads were only able to cater to your search traffic with
Chitika | Premium. I am now happy to introduce Chitika | Select ads, which will display to more than just your search traffic.
This upgrade to Premium ads on will allow Chitika ads to reach more visitors and directly increase your Chitika ad revenue. We estimate Select ads could give publishers a 5 – 10% revenue increase on top of Premium ads alone.
How do Chitika | Select ads work?
Using our click-prediction technology, Chitika | Select ads will display only when there is a higher chance the ad will be clicked. The percentage of non-search traffic that will see the Select ads will vary from site to site.
FAQ’s
Can I Still Use Chitika | Select With Google AdSense?
Yes! Just like the Chitika | Premium ads you can use the new Chitika | Select ads and AdSense together on the same page.
How Can I Upgrade My Chitika | Premium Ads?
You don’t need to, it will happen automatically Monday, March 8th 2010.
Are Chitika | Select Ads PPC (Pay-Per-Click)?
Chitika | Select will always show the highest-paying ads possible. This will include PPC ads as well as CPM image/banner ads (which pay per impression, whether a user clicks or not).
Will Chitika | Select Ads look different than Chitika | Premium?
Sometimes. Similar to how Google shows image/banner ads if they determine that it is the highest paying ad for a certain user visiting the site, we will do the same. Some of your users will see ads with the Chitika | Premium format and others will see ads that look different but will pay more.
If you would rather have your Chitika ads continue to ONLY show to your search traffic, you can learn more about the opt-out option for Chitika | Select in our knowledgebase. *However by doing so, you will miss out on a potential revenue boost!
What do you think of our new Select ads? Please comment below.
As you know, the Chitika | Premium units only show up when Chitika is sure about user intent (because we know what search term the user used to find you). For all of your regular users who are simply browsing your site, the intent is much lower. In these cases, the Chitika ad does not show, and you are not blasting another ad into their face. Due to this, you are not annoying your users with yet another ad unit.
As you can see from the example below, the user keywords are highlighted in gold yellow. This is to explain to the user that the ad is about what he is looking for (Psychobabble Joe says: Since the age of 2, the human brain has been taught to pay attention to that specific color of yellow). When you respect your visitors’ feelings and intent like that, they are more likely to look at the ad and read its contents (and, of course, click on it).
Chitika | Premium ad units have been designed to be hyper targeted, as the ads are almost always completely targeted to the exact keyword the user typed in the search engine. And in the new Mega Unit, ads flow naturally from top to bottom, rather than left to right. “Why is that,” you ask? Its because for the last 10 years, the Internet has worked very hard to train people to read its pages from top to bottom, not left to right. With the Mega-Unit, people’s tendency to read in that fashion helps your second and third ads get almost as much attention as the first.
Put all these three reasons together and you as a publisher/website owner will get from your visitors what you really want — i.e. clicks. More clicks equal more revenue and everybody is happy. By giving your visitors what they want in an ad unit, they’ll give you what you want in return! Isn’t sharing nice?
You can get the code for the mega unit here or signup if you are not already a Chitika publisher.
There are tons of different factors that determine how much money you can make from Chitika ads on your website. In fact, all of these factors can be very overwhelming when you are trying to work on improving your earnings!
To help figure out which factors are the MOST important, we looked at 50 high-earning Chitika publishers, and narrowed down the top 4 factors that they all had in common. By improving these 4 factors on your site, you should see a big difference in your advertising revenue [note: this exercise is using Chitika data, but these 4 factors apply to ALL types of advertising (AdSense, TribalFusion, etc.)].
Let’s face it – to earn a lot of money, you need to have a lot of traffic. If you don’t have a lot of users coming to your site, then you probably won’t get too many clicks on your ads!
While having a lot of traffic is important, we can go a step further and say that specifically US traffic is ideal. It is well-known in the ad industry that the US market is the most developed and lucrative. Our 50 high-earners all showed more than half of their traffic coming from the US.
Search engine traffic is extremely targeted, and advertisers like this. People coming to your site from search engines are most often the people who click on ads. And specifically to Chitika, our Premium ads will only show to this type of traffic! Again, our group of 50 high-earning Chitika users all had over 45% of their U.S. traffic coming from search engines.
This seems obvious, but it is worth looking into a bit deeper. For our group of 50 high-earners, their average CTR was 1.6%, so you should shoot to be in that range or higher if possible.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Don’t! Take a deep breath, put on the new Bon Iver album, and start with just one of the factors. You don’t have to do them all at the same time – just focus on one of them and take it from there.
- Posted by Ryan Travis, Director of Client Services
1. What happened to my traffic from October and November?!? It’s gone!!
The “unaudited” (or ‘raw’) data is cleared from your account every 60-90 days. The reason for clearing your past months of unaudited data is to speed up loading of your current reporting data.
However, your audited stats (which is what payments are based on) will never be cleared from your account. Here’s a great knowledgebase article on how to view your audited data.
To view your “audited” revenue stats in your reports simply click on “Change Report Metrics/Settings” and select “Audited Revenue”:
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2. What happened to Chitika | eMiniMalls?
Chitika | eMiniMalls have been upgraded to Chitika | Premium ads over the past year. With this change we can now cater to ALL types of websites – finance, health, automobile, etc., instead of focusing on websites centered around shopping products & product reviews. Since this upgrade our publisher network has grown from 17,000 to 39,000!
Learn more about Premium and its award-winning innovative technology here.
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3. How come I see “mortgage” ads in my Premium ads? My site isn’t about mortgages!
Premium Ads can only be seen on your page by visitors who enter your site from a search engine, and the ad displayed in this unit will be based on the term they searched for. To preview the ad, we created a Preview Tool that will show you a “test” of how the ad will appear to a search engine visitor reaching your site. The default term for this ‘test’ is “mortgages”.
To use the Preview Tool- Add this text to the end of your URL: #chitikatest=mortgage
Then click ENTER, and Ctrl + R to refresh your page.
You can change the term for this ‘test’; if you change the word “mortgages” to “cars”, you would see an add for cars, etc.
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4. I tried logging into the support section, but it wouldn’t let me!
The log-in for our Customer Support System is different from the account section of chitika.com – this way, non-members can submit questions.
FIRST, click “Submit a Ticket“, to contact support. After you submit your question, you will receive an email with a user name (your email address) and password to log in to the Support section. If not, try checking your spam folder (sometimes the spam monster steals our emails).
We want to encourage anyone who has an issue with their ads or any part of Chitika services to let us know so we can work on fixing it right away. You may have noticed our Feedback tab throughout our website – thank you all for your great feedback!
My neighbor has the greenest grass in our neighborhood. He purchases the most advanced lawn treatment available and cares for it like a child. Last summer he decided to plant some flowers and start a garden because, according to him, “you know, the soil underneath the grass bed is richer and healthier than ever”. He planted vegetable seeds and the prettiest flowers but, a couple of weeks after he noticed the flowers were not thriving and the garden wasn’t growing like he had hoped. He spent all his time on the lawn’s upkeep that he neglected the flowers, expecting them to thrive without any work or effort.
Unfortunately many of our publishers make this same mistake when “planting” ads on their website. You may have a great, well-maintained site with great content, but you didn’t take a few minutes to customize and blend them into your site layout correctly. As a result, you might not be seeing much revenue accumulate in your account; how could this all have been prevented?
Simple customization features are available in Chitika | Premium ads that could be the key to keeping your ads alive on your site. These tricks take only seconds and when you sit back to enjoy the revenue rolling into your Chitika reports, you will appreciate the time you took to do it. Here are a few simple customization tips for your ads to thrive on your pages:
Available customization options:
ch_target = "_blank";
ch_font_title = "Arial";
ch_font_text = "Arial";
ch_alternate_ad_url = "INSERT URL HERE";
All of these customization options can be edited right in your Premium Code Panel.
Posted by: Karla Escolas, CRM/Marketing -Chitika, Inc.
To apply for Chitika ads, click here. If you already have a Chitika account, you can get your Chitika | Premium code by clicking here.
Advertisers and publishers are aware of many more ad networks than the few which were part of the panel discussion that I participated in at the DPAC II conference this past October. Why are there so many networks? As an advertiser or as a publisher, should you work with more than one network? Why work with any network? What are the differences between the networks?
There ARE many networks. Because of this there are a lot of interesting innovations in technologies and service delivery. There are different pricing models. Some networks reach limited demographics and geographies, some reach broad demographics and geographies. Some networks and pricing models are best for short term campaigns and others are great for ongoing campaigns. Different networks offer different opportunities for both advertisers and publishers.
If you are an online advertiser, you likely leverage multiple advertising networks for achieving and exceeding your strategic objectives. Internet advertising is highly quantifiable and you can therefore measure the exposure, volume of traffic and quality of traffic received through your network ad spend as well as any direct ad spend. You are likely analyzing a few of fundamental items such as – How is each advertising program performing towards your overall goal? Top to bottom, which are your best programs? Which programs, if you want to press the accelerator, can allow you to scale?
Our Advertisers, especially in challenging economic times, like the fact that we are a performance based PPC keyword engine with closed loop conversion tracking. To our advertisers, we look and behave as a search engine-like sales and marketing channel. Based upon the more than 500,000,000 ads we served in September to end users who clicked from a search engine to our publishers’ sites, Chitika is trending to become the “3rd largest ad serving search engine” behind Google and Yahoo (uniquely we’re monetizing the “2nd click”).
Some publishers generate all of their revenue through advertising networks. Other publishers complement their direct advertising sales with inventory from advertising networks. With so many networks available, how are publishers deciding which to participate in? Publisher decisions around advertising network partnerships are many and include potential revenue, network mandated rules and contractual obligations, style of advertisements (is the look and feel of the ads appropriate for the publisher’s site?), content and relevancy of the advertisements, quality of advertisers, the initial setup work and ongoing “maintenance” for an ad unit, and the volume of available advertising inventory. Publishers typically have more than one advertising network relationship.
Why is Chitika’s cpc network growing so quickly? Publishers are pleased with several aspects of the Chitika Premium ad program including strong eCPMs, best in class targeting (by design our ads are always relevant to any web page on which one appears), easy deployment, and unlimited inventory from a massive base of blue chip advertisers.
I am looking forward to having an interesting discussion with you – the advertisers and publishers – about this. Whether you are an advertiser looking to expand your reach, or improve the results from your current ad spend, or if you are a publisher looking to improve your revenue stream and maintain a great end user experience, please be sure to participate by leaving comments below.
Many publishers have expressed frustration with our “audits” process (at the end of the month, we discount the invalid clicks from reports – you can read more about this here.)
Well we have good news – with our new Chitika | Premium ads, audits are pretty much a thing of the past! Chitika | Premium is set up differently than our old eMiniMall/MPU units, and audits on Premium units are usually less than 1% of total earnings.
If you have not tried Chitika | Premium yet, you can grab your code here, or to see more about how Chitika | Premium works you can check out this quick video.
Editor’s note: I don’t understand most of the references in this post, but I’ve been assured they make sense.
Strap on your hockey skates and order up a “double-double” at Tim Hortons because we’re happy to announce we now support traffic from Canada in our Chitika | Premium ad program!
While it may seem like this post is mostly aboot making fun of our friends in the great white North, the truth is that we love Molson and poutine just as much as they do (well maybe not as much as they do – but we do love it!). The great news is that Chitika | Premium now supports your traffic from Canada, for any website or blog traffic from ‘A’ to ‘Zed’, so enjoy the additional loonies you will earn.
Click here to learn more about Premium ads, or…
We collect information about your activities on certain websites to send you targeted advertisements. To opt out of Chitika's targeted ads, click here. If you opted out of our targeted ads before March 1, 2010, the opt-out has expired and you must opt out again to avoid targeted ads.
