Chitika|Premium ad unit placement tips

June 24th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Optimizing

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!

Chitika awarding grand prize for iFroggy competition

June 20th, 2008

Posted in: Contests!

We’ll be the first to admit that we love sponsoring fun and cool contests. We’re excited to sponsor a new competition, our first of the year, from the iFroggy Network. Think of it as American Idol meets Survivor meets… something else. Contest: phpBBHacks.com phpBB 3 Hacks and Styles Idol.

The competition is a great opportunity for coders and creators to show off some talent and win some great prizes.

Chitika will award one of the following prizes (winners choice!) for the contests’ grand prize:

Click here to read more and enter the contest!

Just a few of Chitika’s previously sponsored events:
Chitika backs The Next Internet Millionaire
SOBCon-07- Dancing Bloggers
Chitika awards $1001 to Problogger.net contest

Summary of Recent Changes at Chitika

June 18th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Inside Chitika

In light of the recent blog post by our CEO, Venkat Kolluri, I thought I’d add some more breakdown to that blog post.

What happened in the marketplace ?
2008 brought a shift in the marketplace and our advertisers are now paying out on different models, as you can see from the diagram above. Lets take an example of what exactly happened here:

• In 2007: An advertiser (like say “Best Buy” or “Circuit City”) had no problems paying 20-50 cents CPC to get a click from a Publisher (say X). As long as enough of those clicks converted to sales at their end, these advertisers were happy.
• In 2008: The shopping/retail marketplace changed given the tough economic climate in the United States. Now, every advertiser is coming to the table is DEMANDING 2+% conversion rates. In other words, of the 100 clicks sent by Publisher X, atleast 2 should convert into sales.

What is Chitika doing about this ?
To adapt to the new marketplace, Chitika took a couple of steps:

1. Launched Chitika | Premium: This new unit is designed to take advantage of your search engine traffic and pays on a CPC basis. The good thing about this is: Since search engine traffic is high converting, advertisers are happy. Also, since the ads are targeted to the exact queries being typed by users, the content is very good and the CTR is excellent. As you can imagine, users getting good search engine traffic are seeing excellent results on this unit.

2. Launched the Chitika Graphic Ads program: So what happens to traffic that is not from search engines ? Our analysis has shown that these users hardly click on ads. So showing CPC ads to such users (e.g. people who read your blog regularly but never clicks on ads) is a waste of advertising inventory. For such publishers, we implemented a “yield optimization” system to show graphic ads. The beauty of this is that this yield optimization has actually resulted in better results for some of our publishers (specially the ones who used to not get too many clicks before).

3. Launched Direct Ad Sales Initiatives (like AdPro) — This allows the publisher to collect direct revenue from advertisers that might be interested in their site. Stay tuned for more information on this program soon.

Who Will Benefit From these changes ?

1. Publishers with good search engine traffic: The Chitika | Premium unit is working out great for our publishers with good search engine traffic. Such publishers are benefitting from targeted CPC text ads in a competitive marketplace. And on the advertiser side, this creates good conversion rates. This matching of publisher to advertiser is creating a nice health marketplace for all parties involved.

2. Publishers with very high traffic — but who were not getting clicks in the old system. These publishers are now seeing their yields optimized by the chitika system intelligently switching between premium ads and graphic ads.

3. Publishers with good content/brand name sites: These publishers will really benefit from the new tools like AdPro that Chitika is starting to roll out.

Who Will NOT Benefit From these changes ?

Any publisher who does not get significant traffic from search engines. For such publishers, we have made available two options:
a. If you have a high conversion rate (meaning that your clicks convert into sales for the advertisers) you will be successful with the CPA ads.
b. If you have a high amount of traffic (whether it converts or not) you can benefit from our CPM Graphic Ads program.

Publishers who got at least 1000 total impressions during June 2nd-8th 2008, should have got a detailed analysis report from me (Alden DoRosario, CTO) with customized recommendations. This should show key metrics for your traffic along with helpful links and recommendation tips. If you didn’t get this email, checkout the generic version in this blog post.

By Alden DoRosario, CTO Chitika, Inc.

BlogPreneurs Awarded at TiECON: Video

June 17th, 2008

Posted in: Contests!

As previously mentioned, Chitika partnered with TiECON East to host a contest specifically for bloggers, The Blogpreneur Contest 2008.

The contest was to highlight and celebrate the success of bloggers from around the world. We received many great submissions but in the end, 3 successful bloggers stood out from the rest: Jeffrey Strain, of FinancialHack.com; Al Carlton, of CoolestGadgets.com; and Shawn Collins, of AffiliateTip.com

The winners were honored at this year’s TiECON Conference in Boston, MA. Here is the video of their award ceremony:

Read their winning submissions and more contest details here.

Chitika Analysis Report: Top Performer Stats + Optimization Tips

June 16th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Optimizing

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]

Key Metric	Why this matters	Chitika Top Performer Averages
US Traffic (I.e. How much of your total traffic came from US)	The US market is the most developed and lucrative market for advertising revenue.	56.88%
US Search Engine Traffic (i.e. How much of your US traffic came from search engines)	Searchers Equal Clickers/Buyers. Search engine traffic monetizes the most and converts the best for advertisers.	59.87%
US Search Engine Traffic CTR (i.e. For the traffic that came from search engines, what was the CTR)	Location Location Location - Ad placement decides whether visitors click on the ads	1.64%

So what should you do about this ?

Recommendation	Why this matters	Useful Links
SEO	Optimizing your site for SEO attracts lucrative search engine traffic	http://seobook.com/, http://www.seomoz.org/blog
Traffic	High traffic sites gain from incoming links and also benefit from a “Rich Get Richer” principle.	http://www.problogger.net/
Placement	Moving your ads into high heat zones leads to more clicks	http://crazyegg.com/ (Heat maps), http://www.jensense.com/ (A/B Testing)
US Traffic	Follow the money	http://spyfu.com/
Chitika | Premium	Chitika | Premium has been shown to work great on sites that get good search engine traffic	Chitika | Premium Code

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

Manage Your Direct Ad Sales for FREE with Chitika | AdPro

June 13th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News

Chitika | AdPro is a new hosted self service ad management platform, giving publishers the ability to drive and manage direct ad sales, and keep 100% of their direct ad sales revenue.

Chitika | AdPro:

• Promotes publisher’s ad space to advertisers
• Takes care of campaign set-up
• Manages ad serving
• Measures campaign results

How is this different from Google Ad Manager?
AdPro takes care of all invoicing and collects payments from direct advertisers, saving publishers’ time and resources.

Get Started Now: Login to your Chitika Publisher Account and opt-in to our new program.

OR click here to learn more about Chitika | AdPro.

What the f#@% is going on at Chitika?

June 12th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Inside Chitika

A message from Chitika CEO, Venkat Kolluri:

Chitika Evolves with changes in the New Marketplace

It’s not all about CPC’s anymore - different types of clicks are attracting different types of revenue. Advertisers are willing to pay on a CPC-basis for clicks from search traffic, and on a CPA basis for clicks from non-search traffic.

We at Chitika responded with changes to our advertising program to better match up the right clicks with the right type of revenue in today’s marketplace. In particular, there were 3 major changes that lead to exciting new opportunities:

1. A larger, diverse set of advertisers spanning all topics and categories

2. The next generation of eMiniMalls - Chitika|Premium - not just restricted to product offers anymore

3. A new behavioral targeting platform, to track and match different types of click traffic (i.e. - search and non-search traffic) with the right offers (i.e. - CPC, CPA and CPM offers).

Change is the only constant factor at Chitika. We will always barge ahead and evolve with the changes in the marketplace to open up the best possible opportunities for our publishers. Let it rip.

-Venkat Kolluri, CEO Chitika Inc.

NEW: Chitika | OnDemand Self-Service Advertising Program

June 11th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News

Advertisers now have the ability to create, launch, and manage customizable CPM campaigns accross the Chitika network with Chitika|OnDemand, a new self-service advertising program.

Overview Video:

100% Self Service | Be your own agent
Using the Chitika|OnDemand Campaign Management System, advertisers can get a campaign up and running in three easy steps.

After an advertisers sets a campaign budget, uploads a banner graphic, and defines a targeting category, their campaign will launch across Chitika’s network within 24 hours.

Set your Own Budget:

How you can earn free advertising:
Chitika is matching all Chitika|OnDemand advertiser’s campaign budgets by 20% if you sign up before July 31st, 2008. Meaning, if you have an overall campaign budget of say, $500.00, we will boost this to $600.00 of valuable campaign run over our network.

Reach a premium network of 20,000+ websites with over 2 billion monthly impressions!

Get Started in 3 Steps:
1. Create your campaign
2. Pay for your Campaign
3. Get started!

Existing Chitika advertisers: Login here to manage your campaigns.

Making sense of my Audited vs. Unaudited stats

June 10th, 2008

Posted in: Payments

As you may know, all advertising programs like Chitika take proper measures to maintain the quality of their networks using a process of eliminating “fraudulent traffic” from your stats or reports. But something you might not know is that Chitika is the only company that does something a bit different than all of your other affiliate programs: every day, we show you your raw traffic stats so you are aware of the quality of your own traffic. Then, at the end of the month, traffic is removed from your reports that our advertisers will not pay for - clicks from scrapers, automated bots, obvious multiple clicking, etc.- this is a process we call “Auditing”.

There are many names for this process used by other companies that they routinely run as their filtering process, such as, “smart pricing”. Chitika calls this “audits“. Nothing fancy, just self explanatory so you can better understand what it is.

Here are some answers to your most asked questions:

I am a new publisher to Chitika, how do I view my earnings and how often are they updated? You can view your “unaudited” or raw traffic stats daily (before 10:00 AM US Eastern Time) by clicking on the “Reports” tab when you log in to your account.

What is the difference between “audited” and “unaudited” traffic? Your unaudited stats are your raw traffic stats and audits reflect exactly what you will be paid at the end of each month.

When will my audited stats be ready for me to see and how do I view them? You can see your unaudited stats daily (see above). You can view your audited stats by the last day of each month for the previous months earnings. Example: On June 30th you will see audited stats for your earnings from the month of May. View your audited stats by changing your Report Type under “Report Metrics/Settings” after you click on your “Reports” tab in your account:

Why are audits done only once a month?
We do as much filtering as possible on a daily basis. However, not all cases can be filtered on a daily basis so we still have to rely on a monthly process.

When do I get paid? After the auditing process is complete at the last day of each month, those who prefer to be paid from paypal receive a payment if they have reached $10.00, and a check will go out once you’ve reached $50.00.

You can read more about our auditing process here or contact our customer support if you have any questions.

By Karla Escolas - Chitika Customer Relationship Management

Earn an Extra $100 - Last Day!

June 6th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, PPC Ad Units

Chitika web publishers! You have until the end of today to put the Chitika|Premium ad code on your website which will automatically enter you into the Chitika|Premium Challenge.

Login here to get your code!

The Challenge: Chitika will match any revenue you earn from our new ad unit Chitika|Premium (up to $100.00) now through June 30th. You must paste the code directly above or below your article on your page (this is where Premium works best).

Who can enter: Chitika members not currently using Chitika|Premium.

Sign up now or Login to get your Premium code!

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