Do you use Chitika and Google AdSense together on your website to earn great combined revenue? Or, do you want to use them together?

Google AdSense and Chitika Premium ads can indeed be used together on your website or blog. Using both in the right combination can work together to help you earn more revenue than using AdSense or Chitika alone.

In this FREE eBook you will see how seven actual strategically place and customize the Chitika website for a successful steady income.

(more…)

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.

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

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.

One of my favorite TV shows is The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters - for those of you unfamiliar, the concept of the show is that the hosts and a team of sidekicks confront popular myths (”The moon landing was faked!“) and test them out to see if they’re true, possibly true, or untrue (”busted”).

I love this idea, especially for a company like us here at Chitika; now, we’re not going to blow something up with a ton of dynamite like the Mythbusters crew, but I wanted to confront a few myths about Chitika in something I like to call:

Let’s get started!

“Chitika & AdSense can’t run on the same page”

Absolutely, completely, 100% not true. All of our ad units, including our Chitika | Premium ads, are designed so they can run on the same page as AdSense without violating their Terms of Service. You don’t have to alter the Chitika code at all to make it AdSense-compatible - every piece of ad code you generate from your Chitika code panel is already AdSense-compatible. You can read more about this question in a previous blog post, or you can check out the article in our knowledgebase with links to articles from specific publishers.

“Chitika is a ‘replacement’ for AdSense”

Again, this is not true. Chitika’s ads are not a replacement for your AdSense ads, and any ad network telling you to replace your AdSense with their product will probably cost you revenue. Our ads are meant to be a complement to your AdSense revenue, for a number of reasons:

• The look-and-feel of the ads are different, so any readers that have developed an “ad-blindness” to AdSense will be more receptive to the Chitika ads and more likely to earn you more revenue than AdSense alone.
• Ad targeting is handled differently, so different content will be shown. Chitika’s ads are all keyword-based including our Premium ads, which use a reader’s search term (the search term they entered to get to your page) as the keyword.
• Our Premium ads will only display when relevant, so it opens up a world of new placement options. When a user is not coming to your page from a search (like users that have your site bookmarked), we will not serve an ad and the ad does not appear, so you can place the ad unit within your content and your “regular” readers will not even know it’s there. Here’s a very informative graph on this very issue.

  I think we can call that…
  

  “Chitika only does product ads!”

  I will quickly call this one not true, as well. Since it’s release back in May, our Chitika Premium ads have helped us go way, way beyond product sites by serving ads for anything you can imagine.

  
  

  These ads help sites of all types make money, from the b5media network of over 300 sites, to sites such as bankaholic.com.

  Once again…
  

Our publisher support and sales support teams have received a number of inquiries on adding Chitika Premium ads to Google Ad Manager, Google’s new…ad manager. This was the method I used to get up-and-running:

1. Set up an order for the Chitika Premium ads (I called it “Chitika | Premium” because I’m creative) and approve the order.



2. Create a “line item” for the Chitika ads (setting the type as ‘CPC’ and the other metrics as you wish)



NOTE: I manually set the “weighting” to 10 and the targeting to U.S. and Canada traffic, and restricted it to users coming from the major search engines, in lieu of setting up an ad campaign as the “alternate” URL; if this method does not ‘work’ for you, you may need to specify another campaign as the “alternate URL (contact our customer support for instructions).



3. I uploaded the Premium ad as a Rich Media creative and saved the result; if you cannot see the ad after saving it you might need to use the “#chitikatest” preview tool.



4. Once I created the campaign, I created a new ad slot (or, you can use an existing ad slot) for the Chitika | Premium ad



5. I then added it to a placement on the site



6. …and generated sample HTML to try it out on my page.

Questions? Comments? Let us know!

Over the last couple of weeks, a host of ad networks have begun using Chitika | Premium within their own advertising inventory; some small, some much, much larger (Think: Comscore Top-50 type). This post is about the dynamics of using Chitika | Premium in your own ad network. [Due to the sensitivity of each ad network's business model, I cannot 'name any names' in this blog post]

Please Note: If you don’t own or work for an ad network, you might want to stop reading :-)

What is Chitika | Premium?
Chitika | Premium is a behaviorally-targeted ad unit that shows text ads from a diverse set of advertisers. Here are some features of this unit:

• Large diverse set of inventory. There are advertisers for pretty much everything under the sun (from “Batman” to “baseball” to even “Britney Spears”)
• Very highly targeted: Ads are targeted to user behavior (specially search behavior). Due to this, the CTR is high (much, much higher than regular banner AND text ads)
• Clean content: The format is aesthetically pleasing and clean, so your users find this appealing (there is none of the flashing stuff that will make your publishers mad!)

Why would I use Chitika | Premium?
One word: Backfill. Also…

• No channel conflict (there is a good chance you and Chitika are not going after the same advertisers. And if this happens to be the case, Chitika has the systems to exclude your advertisers)
• We only take the inventory we can deliver on, so there is no inventory wasted. If we can’t deliver, we redirect back to your ad server.

How does the implementation work?
The concept is simple: You use the Chitika | Premium ad unit for parts of your inventory. If we have a behavioral profile on this user, we show the unit. If not, we redirect back to your ad server so that the next campaign in line can run.

What Ad servers are supported?
At this time, we have tested this with Doubleclick, 24/7 Realmedia’s OAS and Openads/Openx/phpAdsNew . If your ad server is not on this list, contact us and we should be able to make it work (our engineers are smart and have gallons of coffee at their disposal!)

Who to Contact?
If you are an ad network and this sounds interesting to you, please contact Jeff Sable (jeff [at] chitika [dot] com) OR call 866-441-7203 and select option 1.

What? You haven’t heard about the newest ad unit available from Chitika (which is yielding high eCPM’s for publishers)? Here’s the latest on Chitika|Premium in case you missed it…

Chitika|Premium placement heat map:

Win-Win Ad Unit
Because Chitika|Premium is behaviorally targeted on your pages, users will see optimized results that converts into great revenue for you. When we’re unable to “target” the ad unit, the ad simply collapses into nothing, leaving your page looking like the ad was never there. This is where the other part of “winning” comes into place: You can set an alternate URL for this ad unit so you can earn revenue no matter what.

Users click here to get your Premium Code | Or sign up now

For more optimization tips, check out this blog post.

Coming this week: Publisher Success Story using Premium!

As a publisher, one often wonders how you stand relative to other
publishers on the Internet (specially the high performing publishers).
What are you doing right (or wrong) ? This is an analysis of 50
high-performing Chitika publishers (i.e. publishers with good traffic
and monetization strategies). I hope you find this data useful AND
actionable. [This analysis was done for a 7 day period between
2nd-8th June 2008].

Please Note: If you had significant traffic during 2nd-8th June 2008
with Chitika, you should be getting a customized analysis report in
your mail soon. Stay Tuned.

Traffic Metrics [ PS: While
there are a ton of factors that go into your traffic, we analyzed what
we feel are the Top 3 factors]

So what should you do about this ?

Did I miss something? Continue the conversation or add your own
tips in the comments below.

Six months ago we held a huge blogging event right here on The Chitika Blog. An entire month of blogging wisdom from some of today’s internet thought leaders. It’s holiday shopping season, the best time to open this book for guidance. Lets go over a few of the best tips from this eBook:

• Ten Secrets of an Earlier Adopter Tech Entrepreneur by Chris Pirillo he tells us:


“Ignore the echo chamber – Once everybody starts talking about it, you already missed you chance to be the early adopter”

Who doesn’t want to be the king creator of original content? Take away message: Keep your content fresh!

• Sell Without Selling -By Rosalind Gardner, she says:


“The point is to remember that our customers are likewise put off by the hype they too see every day, so it’s our job as online marketers to advise, recommend and endorse products rather than try to ‘sell’ them.”

Rosalind knows how to bring you to the softer side of selling and when you think about it, it’s easy: Simply get to know your readers!

• Dare to Be Eccentric, Manolo says:


“Do not be afraid to be seen as different, or even eccentric.”

Leave it to Manolo to provide the simple advice that’s uplifting and grounding at the same time :)

That’s just 3 out of many tips from this one of a kind eBook: “Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging“. I’m sure you will find all 30 posts in here inspiring, some may even change the way you blog forever!

The eBook is free read it here.