Bill receives all kinds of support questions on a daily basis here at Chitika. Today he was gracious enough to share 3 important questions that ALL types of Chitika users could benefit from.

What’s the difference between an “impression” and a “page view”?
“You may see these two terms used often and different contexts. While they have similar meanings, it’s the context that makes the difference. Page views are a measure of website traffic. In this context, the term page view represents every time a page from your site is requested by a visitor. If you have three visitors that each request five pages, this will result in fifteen page views for your site.

Impressions are a measurement of the number of ads that are shown on your site. An impression occurs any time an ad unit is displayed. If you have two Chitika ad units on your page and five users request the page, the result will be ten ad impressions since the five users each saw two ad units.”

Are “unique IP addresses” the same as “unique visitors”?
“An IP address is a basically just a numeric pointer for computers and servers on the internet to be able to find each other. For example, if you type “www.Chitika.com” into your web browser, your computer and our servers know how to talk to each other based on this numerical IP address. Therefore, when you look at the number of unique IP addresses accessing your web site, what that loosely means is the number of different machines requesting information from your site.

The area where these two terms are blurred is when either a user accesses your site from multiple machines on separate IP address – for example, at work and at home. In this case, the number of users and IP addresses are both two, but there is actually only one unique visitor. On the other hand, a home or business could have a network that uses only one IP address on the internet. In this case, if two people from inside the network access your site, the unique IP address count would only be one, but the unique visitor count should be two. Generally, web statistics are reported in unique visitors, though this number is a highly-refined estimate.”

My Chitika reports give me a breakdown of impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and eCPM for my account. What is all this stuff?
“As explained previously, an impression is counted anytime an ad is displayed to your visitor. This may happen multiple times per page view if there are multiple ad units on a page. A click is a fairly easy unit of measurement – a click occurs when your user clicks on your ad. CTR or click-through-rate is the percentage of your impressions that garner clicks. For example, if your site has 1,000 impressions in a day and results in 10 clicks, you would have a 1% CTR.

Average CPC or cost-per-click is the average amount that you are paid per click generated from the ad units on your site. This number is represented as an average of the CPCs that you get on each click for each day. Specific CPC values can fluctuate depending on the market and having the average of these values helps to illustrate the overall trends of the CPCs generated for your ads.

eCPM or effective cost-per-thousand impressions (the M is for the roman numeral M meaning 1,000) is a unit designed to help normalize the performance of a CPC ad unit. On a simple level, this number represents the amount revenue you would generate for 1,000 impressions based on your current CTR and CPC. As an example, if you had 1,000 impressions at a 2% CTR you would generate 20 clicks. If your average CPC was $0.20 for those clicks, you’d earn $4 on those 1,000 impressions – a $4.00 eCPM.”

HAVE A QUESTION? Chitika Customer Support is available 24/7, please browse our knowledgebase or submit a ticket here.

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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.

Featured in this eBOOK:

-How to combine Chitika & AdSense ads for a higher total revenue.
-The importance of customizing your ad links to your website links.
-Successful AdSense & Chitika Placement ideas
-Advanced customization tips

(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.