New Chitika Premium Ad Units


Chitika are usually one of my top 3 money makers. Previously , they haven’t converted well on information based sites, kind of like this one. This could hopefully be about to change with their new Interactive Premium Ad units.
Chitika Premium Ad Unit
The units look like traditional text based ads but have a relevent image to the left of the ad text, giving your visitors graphical information as well as getting their attention (a bit like the old trick some publishers with manually did Adsense until Google forbade it). The image to the right is how the unit would/could look on Self Made Minds, I had to use an image rather than the unit for reasons I’ll explain later.

Presently the unit will only show to your US traffic and even then it’s described as behavioural so will only show to “some” of your US visitors. From our tests and observations it looks like one of the key factors to whether the ads are shown is based on the referrer, primarily is the visitor from a search engine, if so show the ad and base the ad content on the keywords used to find the page. This leads to highly targeted ads which should result in a higher than normal CTR and eCPM.

I’ve only been testing these for a couple of weeks but performance so far has been an improvement. I’d recommend at least giving them a test (especially if you have a none product based site that performed badly in the past) and make sure you specify a default ad (instructions here) to monetise the rest of your traffic.

One of Anybody can apply to Chitika and if you’re already with them, the new ads in the Get Code section.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. I had considered using chitika before and signed up to them a while ago, but I’ve found that the email address I used to sign up to them is now getting bombarded with spam, now this email address goes to a catch all account and was only ever used for signing up to chitika, so they have either sold it or it was stolen from their database (which they deny both). So I’m now steering well clear of them.

    • Carl - My name is Ryan Travis, and I am the Director of Client Services at Chitika.

      I want you to know that we have NEVER, and will NEVER sell our publisher’s email addresses to any third-party companies. Your emails will only be used for us to communicate with you and to make payments via a PayPal address (if you choose).

      Regarding it being “stolen from our database” - our Engineering team has looked into this extensively, and done a major security audit. They still do not see a way that this could have happened, but have taken several additional precautionary steps to ensure that it will not happen going forward.

      Unfortunately, with that type of thing in today’s world, there is never a way to be 100% about that. But please do note that we take email/privacy concerns VERY seriously and we would never, ever sell our email lists.

  2. I’ve had mixed results with Chitika (how do you pronounce that anyway?) on one of my product-based sites; however, even on good days, AdSense seems to outperform in the same page position.

    I’ve been using “related products” links as a supplement to AdSense and other ad programs with rather weak performance lately. Perhaps I’ll give these new premium ad units a go in some testing next month…

  3. Have you tried it already?

  4. I currently do not have a Chitika account, but I’m probably give this a try to see how well it perform on my sites.

  5. If the visitor is from a Non US Country, then there would be a blank space shown up or will there be some alternative ads?

    • If the visitor is from a Non-US country, then the default is for the ad to collapse into nothing (no blank space).

      However - you can also set it up to show an alternate ad very easily with our Alternate URL feature.

      Feel free to shoot me an email if you want some help doing this - ryan[at]chitika[dot]com.

  6. The premium challenge time also increased to july31! It’s good news for many publishers who are earning good.

  7. Being limited to US visitors is a bit sad, but your review makes the ads themselves sound impressive. Referrer targeting rather than keyword targeting seems like a step forward.

    Monetization Hub’s last blog post..Displaying Random Ads

  8. Stuart Richardson says:

    Chitika has continued to bill me each month despite a request and their confirmation of closing my account. You may be interested to note that despite my having NO CAMPAIGNS running I am still being billed for CLICKS!

    I am taking action through my credit card company.

    • Hi Stuart -
      You are referring to our advertising-side. I just spoke with them and it looks like there was some sort of glitch, and these bills were sent to you in error. Elizabeth (your acct. manager) will be in touch today, and you will receive a full refund (if your credit card was billed).

  9. Hi Stuart,

    This is Elizabeth from Chitika’s advertiser support team. Please send me your acct.’s user name and I will look into this immediately. Email: elizabeth@chitika.com. Thanks.

    Elizabeth Sloan’s last blog post..Using Heat Maps to Quickly Increase your Revenue

  10. For some reason, Chitika has never worked out too well for me. Always have reverted back to other forms of monetization. Perhaps I will give it another go …

    Food Delivery In Chicago’s last blog post..Late Night Food Delivery In Chicago

  11. I like the idea that the adverts have the picture of the product visible. I think it helps a great deal when the customer can actually SEE the product!!

  12. The Chitika ads look great with the small image on the left. More fascinating than adsense when ‘text only.’ Being from Australia, can I only target the U.S. with Chitika? Thanks, Geoff D.

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