The 3 Commandments of Website Advertising

Rule 1 – Only show ads WHEN the user really wants it

Or: Thou shalt never annoy thy visitors

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.

Rule 2 – Tell your user WHY they’re seeing this ad

Or: Thou shalt respect thy visitors’ experience

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).

Rule 3 – Only show users WHAT they want to see

Or: Thou shalt give thy visitors what they want — in a way they want 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.

Don't forget to water your ads

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:

• Color options: these lines of code will change the color of the ad background, ad’s main link, text of the ad, and the URL of the merchant, respectively (you can use color names, such as “red”, or hex codes, such as “FFFFFF”):

• Target: when clicked, this line of code will make the Premium ad open in a new window or tab:

ch_target = "_blank";

• Font options: these lines of code will change the font of the ad’s main link or the text of the ad, respectively:

ch_font_title = "Arial";

ch_font_text = "Arial";

• Inserting an alternate ad campaign to show an alternate ad unit when the Premium ads do not display:

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.

Online Advertising Cooling Off for "Big 3" Search Engines; Heating Up for Chitika

All across these crazy interwebs, I’ve been reading report after report of doom-and-gloom for online advertising companies.  A couple weeks ago I saw Glam Media change their payout process.  Since then, various sites have reported that even the big search engines are losing steam.

While TechCrunch reports a massive slow-down in growth for the “Big 3″ (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft grew only 0.6% from Q2 to Q3), we actually saw something quite different at Chitika – 200% growth from May – October.

Over these 5 months, our publisher base has actually doubled from 17,000-34,000, and in October we served 550 million search-targeted ads (out of over 2 billion total ad impressions) .  To put this in perspective, Ask.com (the world’s 5th-largest search engine) did 364 million search queries according to the August 2008 ComScore reports, meaning that our network almost doubled their amount of search traffic in October.

This leads to the question: Why is Chitika seeing this growth?  2 words:  Ad-Targeting.