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Chitika eMiniMalls add Category Hints

Posted By Darren Rowse 1st of February 2006 Adsense 0 Comments

The team at Chitika have added a new feature to their eMiniMalls. today but allowing publishers to select ‘category hints’ for their ads. This means that if you choose a keyword to trigger an ad and they don’t have one to serve to your blog that you’ll have a backup ad that is relevant. Here’s how they explain it:

‘Category hint is a new targeting option by which you can pick and choose from a list of categories supported in the eMiniMalls system. Your selected category will be used as a “fallback” in the event that the system does not find an appropriate product for your preferred keyword(s).’

The categories you can select from are outlined here.

The other way to use categories is to allow them to rotate a variety of popular products from your category on your blog. For example on my digicam blog I might choose select the ‘Digital Cameras’ category and not choose any keywords – this will then show a variety of relevant ads for digicams.

So in short – if you have a keyword Chitika will try to serve an ad for that first, if it doesn’t have an ad (or if you don’t select a keyword) it will fallback on the category you’ve selected.

There are two ways to activate categories – firstly for new ads you can use their code panel in the set up process for new ads and secondly for existing ads you’ve already put on your blogs you can insert this line of code:

ch_default_category = “XXXX”;

Where XXXX is the category code listed on this page.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. My big question is: Does this comply with Adsense TOS?

  2. Sure it does, because it’s non-contextual. You are selecting the category — think of it as a list of keywords — and there’s no automatic analysis of the page content to find those keywords.

    As I just said in my blog, the most interesting aspect of this for me is seeing the exact set of categories that Chitika supports. I assume the page will be updated as Chitika ads more product types.

  3. Hmmm… this is interesting. I had never seen Chitika before.

    My only beef is the (not even close) non-standards code. A few of their formats seem to display badly in Safari, as well.

    I’m gonna have to look into this a bit more. I like the idea a lot… just not the implementation.

  4. That’s a nice feature Chitika implemented. Ad space needs to still have to earn money somehow.

  5. […] Via Problogger, Chitika has implemented a feature to try and miprove ad relevancy called Category Hints.  Essentially, if Chitika doesn’t have a product for your keyword, you can specify a category for Chitika to pull from.  I could see this being a great tool because many of my keywords tend to be hit & miss in returning results.  However, for sports bloggers there is a Sports and Outdoors category, but the sample ad is for a tire.  I’m not sure it will improve relevancy for us until they ad more categories. I haven’t seen Chitika on too many sports blogs, and I’m largely giving up on them.  I still have them in a few spots (including here), but I get better clickthough rates and cost per click with Adsense.  Have any sports bloggers had success with Chitika? Tags: Adsense, Chitika […]

  6. Too bad they don’t have more categories. It looks like the IDs they’re using map directly to the Shopping.com IDs (which you can find by poking around Shopping.com’s HTML source). I thought I’d try with a different category than Chitika gave, thinking it would probably work, but it doesn’t appear to. Too bad.

  7. Nice idea, but I’m still getting their stupid pink iPod when there aren’t ads for my keywords :P Apparently the iPod is a home and garden item.

  8. […] Problogger.net: Chitika eMiniMalls add Category Hints Marketingloop.com: Optimize Chitika eMiniMalls Using Category Hints An AdSense Blog: Chitika adds category hints to eMiniMalls […]

  9. Just an update to my comment above re: standards:

    The actual code used to implement the eMiniMalls, is compliant. just FYI.

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