Hey everyone - I want to introduce the newest addition to the Chitika | Premium lineup - the 550×250 MEGA-Unit.  Across our network right now, the MEGA-Unit’s CTR is 4 times higher than our other Premium units - so you can see why we are excited about it!  I want to answer some important questions about it here on the blog:

What is the MEGA-Unit?

It’s our newest Chitika | Premium unit, and it’s really BIG!  Take a look:

Why should you use this?

Across the board, our new MEGA-Unit is adding a massive increase in clicks and revenue:

• AskDaveTaylor.com increased his Chitika earnings from $85/month to $2000/month by adding the new MEGA-Unit to his site (Dave talks about this in greater detail on his site).

• ArticleAlley.com added the new MEGA-Unit and reports that “The result was a massive 721% increase in income -  without any noticeable knock on effect to our other income providers.”  - Adrian from ArticleAlley.com

• Couponmom.com added the MEGA-Unit to just 1 of her pages, and immediately doubled her eCPM and revenue.

How do I get it?

If you have a Chitika account, you can get the unit by clicking here, then choosing the 550×250 “MEGA-Unit” from the drop-down.
If you don’t have a Chitika account, click here to sign up.

Where should I place the MEGA-Unit on my site?

We are seeing it work best placed directly above or below the main content.  For example, you can see where ArticleAlley.com put it on this page (scroll to bottom of article).

Try the new Chitika | Premium MEGA-Unit now!

What do you think about this?  Leave us a comment below!

If you find yourself silently thinking or very loudly shouting the above statement then we’re here to help. The good news is, your ads are probably working perfectly on your site - you just can’t see them; this is actually normal, and I’ll tell you why.

Chitika Premium ads work differently from traditional advertisements on your website. It will not just camp out on your site displaying an ad all the time (which can be annoying to your visitors), because the wise people here at Chitika decided that approach to displaying ads was actually not all that smart. So we decided to do it differently.

The Premium Approach
Premium ads will only appear on your site to a visitor that clicks through to your website from a search engine. Why? Because we believe that targeting their search query and showing an ad related to that will result in a higher CTR and we don’t want you to feel like you are annoying your regular visitors with ads (this is especially important for forum owners).

How to test your ads
It’s very easy to check out how the ad actually displays on your site by adding #chitikatest=keyword to the end of your URL in your browser’s address bar (for example - www.yourdomain.com#chitikatest=doctor)

Hit

Refresh the page by pressing +

You will now see how the Chitika | Premium ad looks on your site for whatever keyword you used in the test (in the example, we used “doctor”).

You won’t see exactly what your visitors will see in the ad unit because for them it’s targeted to their search query, remember? :)

Still have questions? No problem, comment below so I can help.

If, after using the test tool to view the Premium ad on your site, you still cannot see it or are experiencing issues, you can receive assistance from our experts in support. To submit a ticket to support, click here.

Our Chitika | Premium WordPress plugin has made it easy for so many of you to add Chitika | Premium to your blogs, but it is limited in customizations.

Not anymore! As of version 1.3 we’ve made it easy to customize more about the placement appearance of your ads.

You already know you can change the size, colors and placement (above and below) but with just a snippet of code added to your style.css file in your theme you can really make the display your own.

Add Space

Is your ad too close to the post?

Just add the following lines to your style.css file:

.chitika-adspace { margin: 10px 0;}

It will add some visual space, or white space, above and below the ad.

Center your Ad

Don’t like the way your ad looks aligned to the left? Why not center it?

Add this line to your style.css

.chitika-adspace { text-align:center; }

Your Ad Can Fly Right

Do you want your ad to appear to the right of your post?

There’s a couple steps to accomplish this:

1. First you’ll have to choose your placement to be above or both
2. Then choose an ad size with a smaller width
   For this placement style we recommend the 250×250 Square or 180 x 300 ad size

Once you’ve done that, just add the following line to your style.css file:

.chitika-adspace.aboveboth, .chitika-adspace.above  { float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px; }

We also think this option looks cool with a 120 x 600 skyscraper ad (above positioning only) - it’s almost like adding a dedicated sidebar to display ads only to your search traffic!

CSS Classes For You CSS Pros

For those of you who are familiar with style sheets or coding style sheets the plugin now adds the following classes to the divs containing the ads:

• chitika-adspace (all ads)
• above (above only)
• below (below only)
• aboveboth (above when both are displayed)
• belowboth (below when both are displayed)

Have you done anything like this with your ads?

Tell us about your customizations in the comments below!

Since May 2008, the new Chitika | Premium service has been on a tear — growing 10-20% monthly to now sport the 5th largest pool of search advertising in the world. To accommodate this explosive growth, Chitika is hiring some key positions at our Marlborough, Massachusetts offices and is also opening a new San Francisco sales office. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please do send his/her resume to alden [at] chitika [dot] com or drop me a tweet @adorosario

Here are some of the positions that are open with links to more details. All positions are in-house full-time at our Marlborough, Massachusetts office (except the San Francisco sales position)

• Director of Marketing
• Sales Representatives - Publisher Recruitment (multiple positions)
• Software Engineer (multiple positions)
• Sales Representatives - San Francisco (multiple positions)

Please note: These are all current positions with approved budgets. Hiring for these positions is immediate. To apply, please send your resume to alden [at] chitika [dot] com or drop me a tweet @adorosario

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.)].

Factor 1:  Traffic

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!

• Suggestions: Take a look at these resources on building up your traffic - Problogger, Copyblogger, Wikihow.

Factor 2:  U.S. Traffic

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.

• Suggestions: Know where your traffic is coming from!  You can usually check this easily on sites like Spyfu.com, or in your Google Analytics (if you aren’t running analytics software yet, you should be!).

Factor 3:  U.S. Search Engine Traffic/SEO

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.

• Suggestions: Work on your SEO to bring more search traffic to your site.  Here are some great resources to get started - Problogger SEO article, Hubspot’s Website Grader, SEOChat, SEOBook (and their blog), SEOMoz (also has a great blog), and about a million other sites you can find on Alltop :)

Factor 4:  CTR (Click-Through Rate)

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.

• Suggestions: To improve CTR, the most important thing is placement - check out this guide for tips.  Other items that will boost your CTR are customizing your colors, fonts, etc.  You can read how to do that here.

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”:

—————

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.

—————

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.

—————

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:

• 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.

Another update to your favorite Chitika | Premium WordPress plugin went out earlier today.  The new upgrade to version 1.3 is available for download now from the WordPress Plugin Directory:

Three new features in this upgrade are:

• Advanced channel tracking
• Limit Chitika | Premium to display only on permalinks (so they do not clutter up your homepage or category archive)
• Chitika | Premium username reminder

Advanced Channel Tracking

In addition to using a customizable channel name you can now also have the Chitika | Premium WordPress plugin add ‘above’, ‘below’, ‘above - both’ and ‘below - both’ to your channel names simply by checking a box.

Why would I want to do that? Now you can change your setting in the plugin and always know in your reports where the plugin placed the ads. You can track your ads performance this way. For Example: if you choose to display Premium ads above and below your posts, your reports can show you which placement was more successful ‘channel name above - both’ or ‘channel name below - both’ letting you decide if you want to continue to display your ads using that configuration or if you’d like to change them up to find your best placement CTR.

Only Display Ads on Permalink Pages

Chitika | Premium ads are set to display whenever you full post is displayed. If your homepage or archive pages display more than one full post the Chitika | Premium plugin will display Chitika ads for each post. Some of our users prefer to only show on a permalink page because that’s where most of their search traffic lands and this helps keep their CTR more accurate.

Did You Remember to Enter your Username?

When you first install the Chitika | Premium WordPress plugin a demo username is used in place of your Chitika account username. You’ll need to change that in order to receive credit for your clicks. The built in reminder will let you know if you forget to enter your username. We want you to receive your credit (where credit is due!)

So go on, download the update to the Chitika | Premium WordPress plugin.

When its smart to show an ad and when it’s wise NOT to…

The constant question throughout advertising has been and always will be “what type of ad should I show on my website?” As an ad network, we’re sensitive to this question for our users, but also aware of it as we cater to our users. As we took a step back to analyze the situation we realized that in order for our publishers to use their ad spaces to its fullest potential we had to make a fundamental change in the way we display ads in these spaces.

The majority of online ad budgets are wasted on mismatched ads which results in a lower potential of revenue for online publishers. So we decided to change our strategy; from deciding WHICH ad to display, to WHEN to display ads. This paved the way for a new technology you can find in our Chitika | Premium ad units - the industry’s first intelligent collapsing ad units, designed to only show up for targeted website visitors. 

We are honored that this technology is why Chitika was selected as a
Red Herring 100 Global ‘08 finalist. Venkat Kolluri, Chitika’s CEO, will be presenting at the Red Herring conference in San Diego on January 15th. 

Read the full story in our recent press release: Chitika Ad Network Banks on NOT Showing Ads.

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.

Ladies and Gentleman - we have your winners!

After carefully reviewing all submissions (blog comments and email) we have chosen one grand prize winner to receive their choice of:

• Google/T-Mobile G1 Android phone
• Blackberry Storm
• Apple iPhone 3G 8Gb

And 2 runners up to receive $200 each!

GRAND PRIZE WINNER: Donald Yeck of www.DoItYourself.com

The forums at DoItYourself.com are 100% text-based - no graphics at all!  Since Chitika | Premium shows images next to the ads, it provides a nice visual “flare” for his site (and needless to say - the CTR on these ads is quite high!).

Here is what his users will see who come to his website from a search engine:

And here is what his page looks like when a user comes to his page NOT via search engine:

You can see from these shots that the Chitika | Premium units add a nice variety to his layout, which not only is pleasing to his users, but it also puts additional revenue in his pocket.  ;)

The 2 runners up who will receive $200 each are:
www.PurseVillage.com
www.WoodFloorDoctor.com

Congratulations to the 3 winners and thank you to everyone who entered the contest! Subscribe to The Chitika Blog here so that you don’t miss out on your chance to enter & win our next contest.