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.

Read the entire article, “Don’t Lose Faith In The Click.”

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:

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!

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.

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.

We have just updated our Chitika | Premium plugin for WordPress to version 1.2, and it is available for download now from the WordPress Plugin Directory:

This version includes the following updates:

• Fixed bug that caused the Chitika | Premium ads not to display
• New option for ad position:  Above content, Below content, or both above and below (new)
• Better explanation of the “Preview tool” section

Get the new version of the plugin now by clicking here.

Have questions or feedback about the plugin?  Please leave us a comment below!

***UPDATE: Version 1.3 now available with various fixes/improvements. See full list here.

Always check our WordPress page for up to date information.

Zedomax.com increased his revenue by 25% by experimenting with the placement of his ads. And now he has recently released his Adsense and Chitika Optimization Heat Map Version 2, which he says is a “new simplified version of the heat map that will make you more money“.

Also check out Chitika’s heat map for our recommendations for where to place Chitika | Premium ads on your website.

Chitika users click here to get your Premium Code | Or sign up now.

We know you are busy getting ready for the holidays (as are we), so we thought it would be a good idea to offer you a tool to help you save some time, so you can tend to more important things (like, eating lots of left-over turkey!):

Here is your new WordPress Plugin for Chitika | Premium so you can get Premium ads on your website easy and fast!

What is Chitika Premium?

* CPC Search Targeted ad Unit (see how it works here)
* High-targeted relevant ad that converts into high eCPM.
* Use on the same page as Google Adsense. Learn More.

***UPDATE: Version 1.3 now available with various fixes/improvements.  See full list here.

Always check our WordPress page for up to date information.