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.
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.
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:
First you’ll have to choose your placement to be above or both
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:
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!
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!
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”):
-TIP:Matching your site background color, site text colors and links will help your ads blend nicely with your content.
Target: when clicked, this line of code will make the Premium ad open in a new window or tab:
ch_target = "_blank";
-TIP:Enabling this will keep your ad clickers from navigating away from your page.
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";
-TIP:Similar to matching the colors on your page to your ad, matching the text will make it blend even better.
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";
-TIP: Since Premium will only show to US/Canada search engine traffic, displaying an alt URL can help make sure you keep a steady flow of ad revenue coming in.
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.
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