New! We have created a video tutorial showing you how easy it is to get started using Chitika Premium ads on your WordPress blog using our plugin. These instructions will walk you through step by step for WordPress versions 2.7 or higher.

WP 2.7 and Higher Video Tutorial:

Or Click Here To Read Step By Step Instructions.

Download the Chitika WordPress Plugin here:

You Don’t Have a Chitika Account Yet? Sign up here!

*UPDATE: This Contest Is Now Closed* Finalists announced here

Our AdSense + Chitika Ad Placement contest is back again by very popular demand. Last year we had over 300 submissions to this contest with some really great ad integrations of Chitika Premium and Google AdSense on your websites.

Chitika and AdSense can work very well together on your site to bring you a combined higher revenue than using one of these services alone. Some of you have received this higher income because of your thoughtful integrations of these two types of ad services so we have decided to reward you for being so smart!

What are we looking for?
We want you to show us how you use Chitika Premium ads as well as Google AdSense on the same page(s) of your site, in which it helps give you higher revenue than you would using just one of the services alone. Here is an example of Chitika Premium and Google AdSense being used on the same page:

How do you enter?
Post a link to the page on your site in which you feature both Premium and AdSense in the comments section of this blog post. Or, please email your submission to specialprojects (at) chitika (dot) com, with the subject “AdSense + Chitika contest”.

Your entry must include both a Chitika Premium ad and a Google AdSense ad on the same page. Only one page is necessary for entry. Entries must be received by Friday, September 18, 2009- 11:59pm EST.

*UPDATE: This Contest Is Now Closed* Finalists announced here

Hello Chitika friends and neighbors, we’ve got an exciting announcement to make - we’re giving away five Dell Mini 9 Netbooks to new Chitika | Premium publishers! Here’s the deal - you’re eligible to win one of the netbooks if you:

1 - Sign up for a Chitika | Premium ad account between today (8/17/09) and the end of August (must sign up before 11:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, August 31st, 2009), and…

2 - Earn at least $50 through Chitika | Premium between now and the end of September.

Publishers, if you’re not on the Chitika bandwagon yet, what are you waiting for? There’s never been a better time to try Chitika | Premium, the search-based ad network that turns search traffic into revenue for you! Join the over 50,000 publishers making money with Chitika | Premium!

And to our existing publishers, this is a great way to use your affiliate links! Remember, whenever you refer someone who signs up for Chitika | Premium, you earn 10% of what they earn for 15 months. They earn, they might win a netbook, and you earn as well!

So everyone repeat after me: “Make money money, make money money money!”

Chitika has long been a fan of Dave Taylor, the tech guru behind AskDaveTaylor.com (among other sites).  We’re very proud to introduce him as our first guest writer of the summer on the Chitika blog, answering the question “What numbers should I be tracking on my website?”

Enjoy!

“There are two types of people in the online world, the 72.5345% of people who are convinced that the world is a measureable place, and the other bunch of folk who don’t try to add things up. If you’re reading the Chitika blog, you likely have at least a passing desire to keep track of how your advertising efforts are doing, so odds are good (so to speak!) that you are a quant.

That’s a good thing. If you’re not tracking statistics about your site, then you have no idea whether it has more readers than it did last month, what topics are most interesting to your reader community, and whether any of those people are actually clicking on your ads and generating some revenue for you. Yeah, you could just look at your Chitika report at the end of each month and see if it’s non-zero, but hopefully you’re a bit more involved than that.

The problem is that there are so many different numbers to track that it can be completely bewildering. I mean, what’s the difference between an “impression” and a “page view”?  Are “unique IP addresses” the same as “unique visitors”?  Even the Chitika reports have impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and eCPM.  What is all this stuff?

Let’s start by talking about how a Web page is put together: it’s discrete files. The HTML text is one file, and each graphical element is another. A typical page probably has 15-30 graphical elements nowadays, so for purposes of discussion, let’s settle on 20. When you go to that page, you’re requesting 21 files: the HTML file and the 20 graphical files. Those 21 requests are called “hits”, and the HTML request is typically called either an “impression” or a “page view”. If you get 300 visitors to a specific page on your site, that’d mean you would have seen 6,300 (300*21) hits versus 300 page views.  A popular site can easily deliver up millions — or tens of millions — of hits per month!

Now let’s say that on average, everyone who visits your site actually looks at 3.5 pages. Some people, of course, dig in and read 25 pages, while others see one and immediately pop away. Now those 300 visitors are actually accounting for 1,050 (300*3.5) page views or 22,050 (300*21*3.5) hits.  Make sense?

If you were to just count page views, you could fall into the trap of saying you had 1,050 readers, but that’s wrong. That’s how many pages you served up, but in fact you had 300 visitors. Since each computer on the Internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address, if you were to look in your log files you would see that the people who read multiple pages are recorded as coming from the same IP again and again. Ergo, when you want to talk about the number of unique visitors to your site, you look at “unique IP addresses”, and generally it is the same as talking about unique visitors.

Advertisements like Chitika ads are a special situation because not only do you want to keep track of how often the ad is shown, but you also want to keep track of how often the viewer does the desired behavior (click on it). So the number of times it’s shown are the “impressions” in the Chitika report. How many times does the ad actually get clicked on?  That’s “clicks” and the ratio of one to the other is the “click thru rate” or CTR.

For example, let’s say that our site served up 1,050 ad impressions (since a user going from page to page will keep having the ads presented to them) and racked up 37 clicks. That means that it had a CTR of 0.035 (37/1050) or 3.5%. Pretty darn good, actually.  Now let’s further postulate that these 37 clicks earned you $6.39. That means that each click was worth $0.17 (6.39/37). That’s your average cost-per-click (“Avg CPC”, though it should really be called your value per click, but that’s another story). Many big advertisers like to sell ads on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis (CPM, with the M standing for “mil”, Latin for thousand). In this scenario this is $6.08 eCPM (follow me here, that’s 6.39/1050*1000).

On my busy AskDaveTaylor.com site, I pay a lot of attention to my advertising performance. Truth be told, though, all I really look at is the CTR and the revenue figures. The CTR tells me how well the ads are performing, while the revenue tells me if I’ll be eating Top Ramen or a cedar-plank salmon filet for dinner.

I hope this all help you make sense of the complicated world of Web and advertising traffic numbers!”

————

Dave Taylor has been online for 29 years now, and has been blogging since 2003. In addition to his Ask Dave Taylor tech support blog, Dave also writes film reviews at DaveOnFilm.com and explores parenting issues at AP Parenting.com. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc etc, by starting at DaveTaylorOnline.com

This morning, a commentary I wrote for MediaPost’s Online Media Daily was published. The article is called “Don’t Lose Faith in the Click,” and it should make publishers feel better about monetizing their websites despite overall industry drops in clickthrough rate and pay per click.

The Internet has long been the place where advertising models go to die, but one measurable — the click — is still very much alive and kicking. As Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” What we’re experiencing now is, rather, an evolution of sorts - online advertising is being pulled further and further away from demographics and readership rates and closer to intent-based targeting.

Read the entire article, “Don’t Lose Faith In The Click.”

The MIT Entrepreneurial Forum, one of the more interesting groups of smart people on the East Coast, met Wednesday night to discuss one big question: “Is there still money in the advertising revenue model?”  Our own Jeff Sable, VP of Publisher Sales, was invited to sit on the panel, speak, and answer questions.  Video was taken.  Answers were given.  Awesomeness was achieved.  Enjoy the video!

For more information on the event, head over to the event page, and make sure to check out the MITEF if you’re anywhere near New England and are interested in entrepreneurship.

“Bing!”  That sound is a brand new search engine (sorry, “Decision Engine”) from Microsoft leaping into the fray and making everyone’s life a little more Microsoft-y.  Launched in late May, Bing has started taking searches away from reigning powerhouses Google and Yahoo! - and it works great with Chitika | Premium ads.

As much as we love search, and as much as we live by the power of search engines, you didn’t really think we’d be unable to serve ads to Bing traffic, did you?  It’s an exciting new tool that Microsoft hopes will revolutionize the way people search on the Internet.  We’re all over that.

Plus, when I went to grab this screenshot, they had a picture of Boston (where Chitika lives) as the main image.  It was like fate telling us “Yeah, Chitika and Bing work well together.”

So, if your site is getting traffic from Bing, that’s great - your Chitika | Premium ads will continue to show up and be exactly what your site visitors are searching for.

After the release of our new MEGA-Unit: 4x More Clicks/Revenue, thousands of Chitika users got access to a great new revenue increase. This never-before offered size ad unit is ONLY offered by Chitika, and has opened up a new door to revenue solutions for our users. So now if you will, please join me in welcoming the next size ad unit in the MEGA-unit family: the 500×250:

This new ad unit was made for those users who would like to benefit from the untapped revenue of the new MEGA-Unit but their website is limited to a small pixel ad space. Originally the MEGA-unit a: 550×250 was a bit too large for a small number of users. However, we feel it is important to be able to cater to all of our user needs.

Original Mega unit 550×250:

You can grab the new MEGA-Unit by logging into your Chitika account, and clicking on “Get Code”.

We are very interested in how the new MEGA-Unit is working out for you, so please share your experiences by leaving a comment below. And as always, you can request your site needs and new ideas in our forum here.

LOGIN HERE To get your MEGA-Unit size: 550×250 or 500×250

Don’t have a Chitika Account? Sign up in minutes here.

First of all, please allow us to thank all our wonderful publishers. As of 11:23AM EST on June 2nd 2009, Chitika crossed the 50,000 publisher mark. We really appreciate each and every one of you, and thank you for supporting us in our quest to make Internet ads better for everyone - advertisers, publishers, and readers.

Chitika Half Century

On a side note, in the wonderful game of cricket, when a batsman crosses the 50 mark (called “the half century”), the game stops and the batsman raises his bat (sort of like one of our local Red Sox sluggers giving a post-home run curtain call).

Some more cool Chitika stats for data lovers:

• Since the launch of Chitika | Premium last May (about 13 months ago), the Chitika network has more than doubled (an almost 170% increase) from around 18,000 pubs to today’s momentous 50,000+
• The growth has been 100% organic mostly with word of mouth and referrals. <rant>We are the world’s biggest Internet company that has NOT yet been covered by Techcrunch — even though we power ads for most of the companies that ARE covered by Techcrunch </rant>
• A key driver for the growth is that with Chitika Premium, Chitika can run on any type of website (Chitika old-timers will remember a time when Chitika used to be about product-oriented sites only). We are like the AFLAC of online advertising - you add Chitika to supplement your website revenue (sort of like what AFLAC does for insurance)
• Last but not the least, the HUGE new focus on “Respect the User“. The Chitika ads show up only when the user really really wants them (See our 3 Commandments)

None of this would have been possible without our wonderful publishers, and that brings us to part 2 of this post: I would absolutely LOVE to hear your feedback on how we can make the service better. We always strive to come up with new and innovative ways to please publishers and readers, but you are the ones who see our ads in action on your site day in and day out.  Please use the comments box below — or if you are reading this on chitika.com, the feedback box at the bottom right of the page — and let us know what we can do for you. I’m sure there’s something out there that no advertising network in the world does that you want — and we want to be the network to bring it to you!

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.