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.

When its smart to show an ad and when it’s wise NOT to…

The constant question throughout advertising has been and always will be “what type of ad should I show on my website?” As an ad network, we’re sensitive to this question for our users, but also aware of it as we cater to our users. As we took a step back to analyze the situation we realized that in order for our publishers to use their ad spaces to its fullest potential we had to make a fundamental change in the way we display ads in these spaces.

The majority of online ad budgets are wasted on mismatched ads which results in a lower potential of revenue for online publishers. So we decided to change our strategy; from deciding WHICH ad to display, to WHEN to display ads. This paved the way for a new technology you can find in our Chitika | Premium ad units – the industry’s first intelligent collapsing ad units, designed to only show up for targeted website visitors. 

We are honored that this technology is why Chitika was selected as a
Red Herring 100 Global ‘08 finalist. Venkat Kolluri, Chitika’s CEO, will be presenting at the Red Herring conference in San Diego on January 15th. 

Read the full story in our recent press release: Chitika Ad Network Banks on NOT Showing Ads.

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.

All across these crazy interwebs, I’ve been reading report after report of doom-and-gloom for online advertising companies.  A couple weeks ago I saw Glam Media change their payout process.  Since then, various sites have reported that even the big search engines are losing steam.

While TechCrunch reports a massive slow-down in growth for the “Big 3″ (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft grew only 0.6% from Q2 to Q3), we actually saw something quite different at Chitika – 200% growth from May – October.

Over these 5 months, our publisher base has actually doubled from 17,000-34,000, and in October we served 550 million search-targeted ads (out of over 2 billion total ad impressions) .  To put this in perspective, Ask.com (the world’s 5th-largest search engine) did 364 million search queries according to the August 2008 ComScore reports, meaning that our network almost doubled their amount of search traffic in October.

This leads to the question: Why is Chitika seeing this growth?  2 words:  Ad-Targeting.