Hey y’all it’s Terri from Chitika and I was fortunate enough to go attend WordCamp Boston 2010 this past weekend and I have some great tips to share with you.
First off – WordCamp was awesome. If any of you are WordPress publishers, thinking about doing more with WordPress or even just a web publisher you ought to attend the next one close to you! You can find out more about the WordCamp events at central.wordcamp.org. If you missed WordCamp Boston all the sessions will be on SlideShare and SpeakerRate soon, and do make sure to watch the Ignite videos.
Here are the top five tips I gathered at WordCamp that I thought would be great to share with you Chitika Publishers (and blog readers)
54 Online Publishing Tips
Post Often and Consistently
If you have a free week don’t post 10 articles or blogs during that week if you typically post only twice a week. Pick a schedule and stick to it to create a habit. If you have time to write more – write something relevant to your website that might not be time sensitive and schedule it to post in the future or save it as a completed draft to post when you are to busy to write for your schedule.
Check your Spelling & Grammar
Most of us are not English teachers – but make your 6th grade English teacher proud by proofreading. I will usually construct a post and run it through the Word or Open Office grammar and spell check then I’ll read it aloud to make sure it makes as much sense aloud as it does on screen. If you struggle with things like word choice and grammar you should definitely read the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White. There’s a free online version but I highly recommend a copy for your desk to read through at least once – pick one up on Amazon!
Vary Your Posts & Style
Don’t just post text time after time – your regular readers and RSS subscribers would usually love to see different styles of posts. Video posts, audio posts, lists, stories, interviews and add some stock photos to some of your posts too! Your content feels even more fresh when you jazz it up (on top of posting regularly, see also #1).
Full Disclosure is Optional but Recommended
If you are posting reviews for products or services that you may receive affiliate payments from or referral revenue it’s polite to add some text to the page disclosing this information. It’s optional but make sure to check with your legal department or regional government about what kind of disclosure laws are in place to protect bloggers and their readers. For US Publishers: How do bloggers follow the Endorsement Guides?
Want more tips? Post a comment and we’ll make sure to address some more web publishing tips in the future!
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.”
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
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.
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.
This years’ grand prize winner will receive:
a Playstation 3 Slim + NFL Madden 10
And 2 runners up will receive:
$200 each!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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