I run Chitika Premium ad units on some parts of my blogs – particularly at my photography site on single pages. One ad unit that I’d had running for a while now was one that appeared above posts whenever anyone from the US arrives at my site from a search engine.

I like these ads because they don’t appear to regular readers arriving from RSS feeds, newsletters or other sites – just those people coming in from Google – PLUS the ads that show are contextual ads to the search that the person has just performed.

I’ve always found that the ads convert pretty well – but this week I realised that for months now they could have been converted ALOT better.

I made this realisation by making one simple change to one ad unit – here’s what happened to my earnings on that ad unit when I made the change.

Yep – the ad unit had been averaging around $37 a day – but in the few since making the change it’s earned around $108 a day on average – around 3 times as much!

Considering I’ve had the ad running for quite a few months now – I’ve been leaving money on the table.

OK before I tell you what change I made (and it’s so simple that I’ve been kicking myself for a week now) I want to really emphasise the take home message here – even though it is so very obviously – test your ad units!

Here’s the thing – the chitika ad that I did have in this ad position used to perform to the best of its ability. I’d previously tested it and made sure it was working well. However Chitika added a new option to their premium ads – an option that I ignored. In actual fact someone from Chitika told me to make this change months back – I got distracted (life’s busy) and never got around to doing it.

While I feel pretty stupid and am completely aware that I’ve cost myself thousands by not making this change earlier – I know I’m not alone.

Many bloggers are in the same boat. We put ads on our blogs, get them to a point where we think they’re well optimised and then move on to work on other aspects of our blog without ever coming back to make sure things are still performing at their highest potential. Ad networks change their offerings, add features and sometimes blogs just change and things that used to work well no longer do.

The lesson here is to revisit your ad units and to test if there might be someway to increase their performance. You might not see the tweaks you make bring in $70 a day like my one did – but over time the small tweaks add up!

What was the change I made?

The change was so simple – I just made the Chitika ad unit bigger. The ad unit I used to have on there was a 468×180 pixel sized ad. The new one is a 550×250 pixel ad unit. It’s considerably wider (it now takes up almost the whole width of my content area) and a little deeper.

It does push the content down the page a little but as it’s only impacting search refferal traffic and the content is still above the fold user experience isn’t impacted that much – but the ad performance is so much better (with 3-4 times the click through rate depending upon the day).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Learn From My Mistake – Don’t Leave Money on the Table!

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This ad unit is a 550×255 pixel sized ad – it’s not small but their testing has shown some pretty impressive results with publishers reporting big increases in earnings as a result of using this rather than their smaller ad units.

Here’s how the mega ad unit looks:

How do Chitika Premium Ad Units Work?

• As with all of Chitika’s ‘Premium’ ad unit range these ads only show to US/Canadian readers arriving on your site as a result of a search on Google or one of the other search engines.
• If the reader is a loyal reader that is coming from your RSS feed or another site OR they are a reader from outside the US/Canada they won’t see them (note: there is an option to have an alternative ad shown for non search traffic if you wish but I don’t choose this option and have the ad collapse and not show at all).
• The ads showing on the unit relate to the search that the person arriving on your site is doing – this significantly increases the chance that they’ll find the ad relevant to them and click the ad.
• The ads can be customized to have different colors and fonts.
• Chitika’s testing finds that this ad unit is converting best if you slot it above your content (as you’d expect) or below content (above or below comments would work). Remember this is only showing to search engine visitors so an aggressive ad placement won’t annoy loyal readers.
• If this mega ad unit is too big or the wrong shape for you – Chitika’s premium ad units come in a large range of other sizes. You can see the add unit size options here (you can also check out what kinds of ads will show for different search terms on that page also).

How do they perform?

I have only started testing this new mega unit sized ad on my blog but have had a lot of success with other sizes of premium ad units for a long time now – I fully expect to see some great results with the larger ad unit.

I have a smaller ad unit showing on my photography blog above posts and have added a mega unit below posts to see how they perform.

What I particularly like about the premium ad units is that unlike previous Chitika ad units these convert on sites of all kinds of topics. Their previous ad units were very much suited to product/gadget related sites – but these ad units are converting for all kinds of sites and topics.

In a newsletter that Chitika sent to their publishers today they are reporting some fairly amazing results from other publishers who have been testing this ad unit. Here’s a screenshot (my highlighting):

I’m sure results will vary from site to site but at the very least I think they’re an option to be testing if you’re looking to make money from your blog.

If you’re not a part of the Chitika ad network yet – sign up here today and give them a go for yourself.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Mega Units – Publishers Reporting Massive Increases in Earnings

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I’ve been nagging the Chitika team to get them to produce ads for non product related sites and they’ve been hinting at a new ad unit for a while that will meet this need. In the last week or so they’ve released it – Interactive Premium Listing Units.

They look like this:

The ads are quite like their other units but they are ads for all kinds of other products. I’ve included a live one lower on this post (although not all of you will be able to see it – read on to find out why).

The ads are getting good reviews from publishers that I’ve been chatting with who have tested them although at this stage they will only be served to US readers (some of them). At this stage the ads target at US readers and even then they are ‘behavioral’ and not all US readers will see them. If Chitika feels it’s more profitable to you they show other ads.

The ads pay on a CPC basis and you can specify different keywords when generating your code for the ad. On the following ad I’ve chosen ‘Search Engine Optimization’ as the keyword.

To test out these new ad units Apply to Join Chitika Today.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Interactive Premium Listing Units

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“We have seen that there are a LOT of times and situations where a publisher’s ads simply will not get clicked on. In these situations, it makes the most sense to show graphic ads in order to bring in the most revenue possible.

Right now we have rolled out graphic ads to countries where our publishers are currently NOT making revenue. We have done this because we want to ensure that when we fully launch this in the US (and other revenue-generating countries), that we are bringing in the highest-quality ads that are paying the highest rates.

Our only goal here is to make our publishers the maximum amount of revenue possible. As we move forward, we are fully-focuesed on working out the kinks (and filtering out all of the low-quality, “spammy” ads) in order for this program to be a major success and at the end of the day, our publishers will be receiving bigger checks because of this.”

I’ve already seen a few improvements in the CPM ads. It seems that they have a system in place to weed out the lower quality flashing ringtone ads. I’m hoping it’ll continue to improve to the point where we’ll start seeing brand ads that will not only earn more but ‘fit’ more on most blogs.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika’s Response to CPM Ads Concerns

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In a sense these CPM ads are ‘alternative ads’ – so if a reader comes from Japan for instance they see the new CPM ad instead of a default ad or a Public Service Announcement. The theory is that at least you’ll earn something from the ad.

I can understand why Chitika are doing this and why it’d be attractive to many publishers. Most sites get at least some decent traffic from the countries that Chitika (and other ad networks) don’t support and to not monetize it is a pity. However….

What concerns me a little about these ads is that the announcement post says that it’s not just when someone from a non supported country visits your site but rather they say they serve them ‘when it makes sense’ to do so and give this example:

“if you are in Canada, and viewing a page with a Chitika ad on it, we will most likely show you a CPM Graphic banner because we are seeing more revenue from graphic ads for Canadian traffic.”

This is all well and good if you’re just looking at the bottom line (who wouldn’t want the most profitable ad served?) but the banner ads that I’ve seen so far are not what I’d consider to be of a high quality. They’re not relevant to sites (ie they are not contextual) and they look cheap and nasty. I hope that Chitika will work to attract premium brand advertisers – but in the mean time I’m considering opting out of the CPM ads at this point. Steve from UMPCPortal tells me he saw cheesy Ringtone ads on his blog and other bloggers are reporting similar low grade ads.

Opting out of the program (it is set to ‘ON’ by default) means you’re likely to take a hit financially so don’t do it without thinking it through but if you have a site where you don’t want banner ads appearing then you might want to consider this.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Roll Out CPM Filler Ads for Unsupported Countries

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The announced it back in March here and here:

“This new graphic ads service has one goal: maximize your revenue. The Chitika ad on your page will display a relevant and targeted banner/graphic ad on your page only when it makes sense – when it will earn you more revenue.

Graphic ads will pay per impression (CPM) and will be shown only when they can earn you more revenue than a CPC-based ad. Our ad targeting system will intelligently find and display relevant graphic (CPM) ads for your pages when appropriate.”

I wouldn’t mind seeing these ads in action before I pass comment on them. For me it’ll all come down to the relevancy of ads as to whether I’d opt out of this program (they are giving publishers a choice to opt out). While the ads will definitely increase revenue on pages that are not generating clicks if the ads are ugly/irrelevant then they could hurt the look and feel of the page and reader experience.

Also today I received an email from Chitika announcing another ad unit - Interactive Premium Listing ads. Here’s how they look:

These ad units are not focused upon any one specific product and Chitika say that they work best when you ‘have mostly US traffic and are looking for a Chitika ad unit that is NOT product centric!’

Once again – these ads are going to be rotated in through all publishers ad units when Chitika feel that this ad unit will pay more than regular ad units. The exception is when you opt out of the program. What is displayed in the ads seems to be dependent upon what a reader searched for in a search engine when arriving on your site – so in a sense the are still targeted/contextually relevant but to the search terms of your reader and not necessarily your content.

It’s a good concept and one to watch to see how they perform.

Not yet a Chitika Publisher? Sign Up here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Add Interactive Premium Listing Ads Into the Mix

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I’m not sure that I’ve really featured this ad unit here before on ProBlogger – so let me give you an introduction to it if you’ve not seen it.

Chitika LINX is a PPC (you get paid if someone clicks them) in text ad. If you activate it on your site you’ll see some words on your posts become links with little double underlines under them.

If your readers put their mouse over these links a little popup appears that shows a Chitika ad unit (pictured left). If your reader clicks on the ad unit you get paid.

These in text links have been offered by other ad networks for some time and publishers are generally in two camps on them.

On the one hand the ads do tend to convert reasonably well because they are in your content contextually and as a result in the line of site of your readers. So some publishers love them.

On the other hand some publishers see them as intrusive and disruptive (due to the pop up element) and other don’t like them because they like to keep their content area free of advertising.

I’ve text this type of advertising (using other networks) on a couple of my blogs at different times and did find them to convert well. I was also surprised that I didn’t hear any negative feedback from readers. Having said this – apart from the odd testing of them I’ve decided not to use them on my blogs.

Other options if you’re looking for in text ad link alternatives like Chitika LINX:

• Kontera

• Amazon Associates offer Context Links

• IntelliTXT – from Vibrant Media

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Updates it’s LINX Ad Unit

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Chitika publishers will now fit one of three categories – Silver – Gold and Premium.

Each level has it’s own privileges – from what I can tell most publishers are Gold publishers (I’m not sure why there’s a Silver category) with premium publishers qualifying by fitting this criteria:

You have used Chitika ads consistently and made at least $1000 over the past 90 days

AND / OR

You have a proven high-quality of traffic based on the feedback of our advertisers.

What do premium publishers get?

• Higher Rev Share (no details on what this actually is)
• CPM and PPC ads (get paid for impressions as well as clicks)
• Real time Auditing (no more waiting til the end of the month)
• Dedicated Account Manager
• Custom Ad Units (Chitikas designers can create something to suit your blog)
• Instant Chat with your account Rep (if you’re in the same time zone – I’ve never seen mine online)
• Account Overview Reports (monthly)
• Customized backup categories (tailor a category specifically for your blog with specific products)
• Chitika Premium Publisher Badge (pictured right)
• Spots as a guest blogger on Chtiika’s blog

As a publisher who has been put in this program my own attraction to it is the higher rev share (although I’ve not really seen any marked improvement), the CPM ads (my CPM income is about 10% of the click revenue – a nice jump!) and the possibility of custom ads.

I do think it’s interesting that Chitika have gone public with announcing what premium publishers get. AdSense are public about the fact that they have a premium publishers program and have mentioned at different times what number of page views is needed to get into it – but they’ve always been more vague on what those publishers get. In doing so I wonder if they’ve created less of an ‘us and them’ feeling with their program.

My worry is that perhaps by giving everyone a category and telling everyone what they are missing out by not being premium publishers is that they might frustrate their middle and lower tier of publishers. Time will tell.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Launch Premium Publishers Program

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Just under two years ago a controversy erupted in the the ‘make money online’ segment of the blogosphere that involved a lot of hype, anger and attack.

It involved the launch of a new advertising network product called – Chitika eMiniMalls.

I had been beta testing this new ad unit for a few weeks and was one of a small group of bloggers who blogged about my experience of it and how it had significantly increased my earnings. I wrote my first review of Chitika here.

A couple of weeks later after continuing to experiment with the ad unit my earnings with Chitika continued to grow and I revealed that I was earning over $700 per day with them – they’d become my biggest earner.

The result of me (and others) reporting my success with Chitika caused a real stir around the blogosphere and when Chitika announced an affiliate program which paid 10% commission the ’stir’ quickly became ‘hype’ as many bloggers pumped Chitika up as being an AdSense killer and the answer to all problems of bloggers struggling to make money online.

I attempted to communicate a more balanced review of the ad unit (they work well on some blogs but not others) but the frenzy and buzz that surrounded Chitika for a few weeks was like nothing I’d ever seen around a product launch before.

Of course the positive buzz around Chitika didn’t last for too long. Chitika made a few mistakes in their launch (I suspect overwhelmed by the numbers of those signing up) and in getting the mix between serving publishers and advertisers they had to make some tough decisions which saw some publishers see decreases in earnings. This of course didn’t go over terribly well with many.

At the same time some publishers found that Chitika didn’t work on every blog (as they’d read some promoting the affiliate program promising) and became disillusioned by Chitika and anyone who had promoted them.

The resulting backlash against Chitika was as strong and vicious as the previous weeks of positive buzz had been – the pendulum has swung to the opposite end of it’s trajectory. Many bloggers expressed real anger, quite a few vowed never to use Chitika again, accusations of fraud and scrupulous behavior flew left right and centre. I took a lot of flak for my positive (yet in my opinion balanced) reviews of Chitika (in fact the attacks on me in those months were the most vicious I’ve ever experienced and escalated to a point where my property was physically assaulted).

While many many bloggers jumped off the Chitika ship as the popularity pendulum swung away from them – I felt that while Chitika had issues and had made some mistakes that they were a company with potential. They needed to improve their service – but the basics that they had put in place were good and in time I felt that they’d improve.

Rather than jumping ship (or throwing the baby out with the bath water) as many were doing I decided to do two things:

1. give constructive and encouraging feedback to Chitika - While much of the blogosphere descended into snark and attack I decided to attempt to help Chitika improve. I did this in part because I felt it was the right thing to do and that they didn’t deserve all of the hits that they were taking – but also because I knew that if they improved what they offered – that it’d enhance my own business. I told them what I liked about their product, what I didn’t like, what I wished they’d change and what I wished that they’d add.
2. experiment with the use of their service to see how it worked best - I spent significant time in those early months really tweaking and tracking the use of Chitika’s ad units. I saw from my own experience and the reports of others that it didn’t work on some blogs yet did on others – so I decided to work out where it did work best and how to improve it’s performance. This resulted in a series of tips posts including Chitika eMiniMalls Tips.

A few other bloggers quietly took a similar approach in the midst of the Chitika bashing that went on around us. The results were quite amazing.

Firstly – Chitika improved. Since that time the company as grown and offered a variety of new ad units. They have had their ups and downs but what they offer now benefits many bloggers. While these ads still don’t work on every blog – many bloggers have found ways to make them work for them. I know a few who make more than I do from Chitika each day.

Secondly – My own experience of Chitika and what they contribute to my business has confirmed to me my hunch that it wasn’t something to jump ship on. I revealed in a post 4 months ago that I’d earned just under a quarter of a million dollars using Chitika – of that figure is now well in excess of the quarter of a million dollar mark and continues to confirm to me the value of taking a different approach than being swayed by popular opinion and doing something positive instead of being caught up in the pendulum swings that the blogosphere can become distracted by.

Is the Pendulum Swinging Again?

In the last week we’ve seen a pendulum swing over the launch of BlogRush service that reminds me a little of the Chitika fiasco. The service launched in a frenzy of praise and hype as bloggers jostled to benefit from referring others. While many posted about it advising caution and trying to paint realistic expectations – some posts that I read painted this new and untested service as though it was the Messiah!

Yes – BlogRush needs to take some responsibility for the way they presented themselves (they talked themselves up as you’d expect – and gave bloggers an incentive to talk them up) but many bloggers took it to another level and promised the world from the service.

In the last 24 hours – since the release of BlogRush stats – the pendulum has swung and I’ve seen quite a few bloggers painting the service as ‘evil’. Once again bloggers are jumping ship left right and center and accusations are beginning to fly.

While I don’t know if BlogRush will ultimately be as successful for bloggers as Chitika has been for those who remained on board – I found myself wondering how many bloggers are in danger of prematurely throwing a potentially good thing away simply because it didn’t work for them in the in the first day or two.

• What would happen if rather than dismissing or attacking BlogRush bloggers looked the service over and compiled some constructive feedback for it’s creators?
• What would happen if bloggers took the time to analyze how it works and to experiment with different ways of using it?
• What if bloggers pressed pause on their judgement and allowed the creators of this product to improve it?

I’m not saying bloggers should blindly accept every new service that comes along as ‘the answer’ – there may come a time to ‘jump ship’ from BlogRush if it doesn’t work (either for anyone or in individual circumstances) – however I wonder if we all need to take a chill pill and let things run their course a little.

Yes – it may be a big flop – but perhaps if we give it (and other services that emerge) a chance we might just see things grow into something worthwhile that enhances our blogging.

Just my two cents worth.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How Not Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water Earned me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

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It’s still in beta and I’m not one of the lucky few to be invited to test it – but from the overview page it looks very similar to other in text advertising options like Amazon’s Context Links system, Kontera’s ContentLink product and Intellitxt (and others).

All of these systems will look at your content for keywords that they can match to an advertisment. They then make those words links (usually with some different kind of formatting so that readers are aware that they are different – in the case of Linx a double underline) and then when readers hover the cursor over the link a small popup appears with the ad.

In the case of Linx the popup seems to contain an eMiniMall ad unit (as pictured).

The ads are CPC (you get paid if someone clicks the ad).

Publishers generally have a fairly extreme love or hate for this type of advertising.

They do interrupt the reading flow which is a cost publishers should weigh up before installing them – however I do know of a few publishers who find this type of ad converts quite well – particularly on product related sites (which I suspect Chitika will have as their focus with the invitations that they offer).

I’ve been testing a couple of other similar systems in a very limited way on a couple of my blogs with limited success but will be interested to see what the earnings per click is like on these.

You can read more about Chitika Linx Beta here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Linx – Beta In Text Advertising

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Very cool idea and something practical that I’m sure will get a lot of use.

I’m not sure what the cutoff point was for who got one and one didn’t but have seen a few publishers talking about them.

Thanks Chitika.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Send Top Publishers iPods

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Wouldn’t be nice to have you Chikita emini-mall or ShopCloud$ (aff) showing up as the Alternate URL of Adsense?

Here is a trick I recently learned on how to do it.

Just set up a BLANK page, completely blank no header no footer nothing, on you blog/site with no content at all but you chikita code then use the URL of this page as the alternate URL in adsense.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Put Chikita as your AdSense alternate URL

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I’ve had reasonable (and increasing) success with Shoplinc since it launched a few months back. Once you have people in the Shop it converts very well (high CTR as there is limited other options to click on). The challenge however is getting people INTO your shop in the first place. This is not as simple as adding a ’shop’ link to your menu (although this is one thing you should do).

One single link into your shop is not enough – consider adding other ‘doorways’ in including:

Deep Linking Strategies - the way that I’ve found works best to get people into my Shoplinc is through deep linking from individual posts on my blog to individual products in the Shoplinc.

Each product in Shoplinc has it’s own URL which means that if you link to it that you’ll have a permanent doorway into the shop.

When I first signed up for Shoplinc I spent a few days going through thousands of my old posts setting up such links in my posts. Typically they look like this:

Compare prices on the Canon EOS 30D

Of course this link works best if it’s from a page (or pages) that are about the Canon EOS 30D digital camera as people are much more willing to click a link on that topic if they are in fact looking for prices on such a camera.

This deep linking strategy took me considerable time to do. I could possibly have found a more automatic way to do it via my templates but the couple of days that it took me to do this has been well worth my effort.

Each one of these links is a doorway into your shop (the more doorways you have the more potential visitors).

The flow on effect of setting up these deep links is that they provide your Shoplinc with a little Google Juice – which in time means your Shoplinc will begin to get indexed and ranked higher in Google (and other search engines). As a result you can end up not only with traffic from your blog but from search engines.

Search Our Shop Tool - Chitika has a ’search tool’ that lets your readers search for information in your Shoplinc directly from your blog. Place this in a prominent position on your blog and you have yet another gateway into your shop.

Promote your Shoplinc – Anyway you can promote your shoplinc and direct visitors to it is a bonus. For a few months on my blogs I had a spare banner position that other sponsors were not using – at that time I ran ads for my own shop. I’ve taken out blogads and even run AdWords campaigns. Perhaps buying some ads on Performancing’s new ad system would be something to experiment with.

Other Shop Options

Of course Shoplinc is not the only type of shop that you can add to your blog. Amazon recently introduced aStore and there are numerous options to building your own (using Amazon, eBay and other programs).

The key with all of these is of course to provide your readers with doorways into your blogs (using some of the above strategies).

It does take work – but if you have a blog with decent traffic you’ll end up with an extra revenue stream for your blog this Christmas (and beyond).

Tomorrow we’ll move on from Chitika and look at Affiliate Programs.

This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Optimize a Shoplinc Store

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Positioning Ads

Good positioning of Chitika ads is similar to that of AdSense in that in general they work well above the fold (with some exceptions – see below) and in areas of your blog where people will naturally look (ie near content).

RPU ads do particularly well at the end of posts and above comments as they are a logical next click once people have finished reading your blog.

SPU (single product units) and MPU ads (multi product units) - my strategy with these two units is to use both on the same page. I generally use a small SPU at the top of posts and MPUs at the bottom of them (where readers might be looking for other options).

Sidebars – I find that Chitika ads don’t tend to work well in sidebars. If you do use them in this position use them at the top of a sidebar where they’ll get more attention than the clutter of the middle of a sidebar.

Cloud Tag Units - These are new units and I’ve not used them but they could be another useful unit to place down the page at the end of posts. I’ve not used them simply because I already have enough ads at the end of my posts and they do not actually earn anything for the first click but instead lead people to your Shoplinc Shop where they earn you money if people click on a product (whereas eMiniMalls, RPUs and AdSense ads earn money on the first click.

Read more on Optimizing Chitika ads in a previous post on the topic here.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I’ll talk about using Chitika’s Shoplincs.

This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

More Chitika Ad Optimizing Tips

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Chitika (aff) have been providing publishers with advertising options for over a year now and now offer a range of types of ads including:

• eMiniMalls (single product and multi product units)
• Relevant Product Units (RPU)
• Shoplinc
• ShopCloud$ (very new)

What I like about this range of ad units is that between them there is bound to be a format (or more than one) that fits with the design of most blogs and websites.

Note – Keep in mind that Chitika ads are very much ‘product focussed’ and work best on sites that have a topic that is directly related to topic (for example gadgets and consumer electronics, clothes, home and garden, toys etc)

So how do you optimize Chitika ads?

Many of the principles that we talked about with AdSense ads in previous posts are also relevant for Chitika ads (particularly those on Positioning, Design) however there are a number of things that you can do to help with Chitika ad performance (I’ll particularly focus upon eMiniMalls and Relevant Product Units here). First lets take a look at the art of targeting Chitika Ads and the next post we’ll look at some other Chitika optimization techniques:

Targeting Ads

As with AdSense, one of the keys with Chitika advertising is that you get ads that are as relevant as possible to the content that you have on your blog.

I cannot emphasize this enough, the blogs where it works best for me are where I write about a particular product and where Chitika ads for that exact product appear around it. Obviously these work well because readers are actively seeking information on the product and once I’ve given them information they are naturally curious about how much it costs and where they might buy it – when they see the ad they naturally click.

Targeting particular ads with Chitika takes a little more work than it does with AdSense as in most cases you won’t use Chitika in contextual mode (for example on pages where AdSense also runs you are not allowed to use another contextual ad system). This means you need to manually target ads to the topics that you’re writing about using their ability to add keywords.

This sounds quite an involved process – however it need not be if you don’t add individual ads on each post but rather insert the ads into your blog’s templates.

Use Titles to target Ads – the most effective way that I’ve found to target relevant Chitika ads is to use the titles of your posts as a keyword for the ad (this works for both eMinimalls and RPU ads).

To do this on a WordPress or Movable Type blog you simply use the title tags in the keyword part of the Chitika ad code and insert the code in the relevant parts of your individual post templates. Then as you write posts you need to keep in mind that your titles trigger ads for posts – this means your ads will have to include good keywords (product/brand related ones work best).

Categories – note every post you write will have a title that directly triggers ads. As a back up choose a category for your ads that is relevant to your blog. Chitika have added quite a few categories to choose from in the past 12 months so hopefully there is something there that is relevant.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with more tips on optimizing your Chitika ads but in the mean time you might like to see my previous post on the topic of Chitika eMiniMalls Tips.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Improve Your Chitika Ads Performance

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• 300×250
• 250×250
• 160×600
• 160×160
• 120×600

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Add New Sizes to ShopClouds

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On my blogs hundreds of people use my search tools every day. I know this because until recently I’ve been using the search tool provided by AdSense for my search tools and it gives some basic statistics on how many searches there are and what people are searching for. It also gives you a way to monetize your search results by running AdSense ads in your results (you can see an example of it running in ProBlogger’s side bar at the moment).

The AdSense tool is OK – it does a reasonable job of giving good search results – however it does take a few days for newer posts to become searchable and I’ve found that the money that it brings in is almost non existent (around the $1 per day mark across multiple blogs).

I’ve long been dissatisfied with the return on AdSense search but thought that the dollar a day was better than nothing ($365 a year isn’t something that will go astray).

So this week when I found an alternative to AdSense for search to monetize the internal searching on my blogs I was interested to see what would happen.

Monetizing Internal Searching with Chitika

Earlier in the week I was wandering through Chitika’s support area and came across a tip that had previously escaped my attention.

In short – it will allow you to show Chitika eMiniMall ads in the search results page of your WP blog (if you use the default WP search template) with products in the ads that relate to the search.

The process is pretty simple to do (outlined below) and I’m happy to report that the results have brought me an improvement on the money earned from internal search. While I’m still not earning a lot from it, the last few days have seen a 500% improvement (remember I didn’t start with much) on some of my blogs. Don’t expect big dollars but do let me know how it goes for you.

I’ve not used it here at ProBlogger because this blog isn’t a product related blog (and as a result Chitika doesn’t work well with it) but on some of my other product related blogs it works well.

Here’s the process outlined by Chitika:

1. Sign in to your Chitika account, click the eMiniMalls tab, and generate your eMiniMalls code.

2. Go to your WordPress dashboard (e.g. http://your-domain.com/blog/wp-admin/). At the top of the page, click on the part of the bar that says “Presentation:”

3. Click on “Theme Editor:”

4. On the right side of the screen, click on “Search Template:”

(*NOTE:These instructions are for the “WordPress Default” Theme*)

5. Change the permissions of the search template (so that you are able to edit it) by running the following command:

CHMOD 777 wp-content/themes/default/search.php

(*NOTE: If you do not have access to the shell, have your administrator do this for you*)

6. Find the following line in the template code:

<h2 class=”pagetitle”>Search Results</h2>

7. Paste your eMiniMalls code underneath this line.

8. Change the following line:

var ch_queries = new Array( );

To this:

var ch_queries = new Array(”<?php echo wp_specialchars($s); ?>”);

9. Click “Update File”

Your search results will now have an eMiniMall (targeted to the search query) at the top of the page.

A variation on this process is to add the ad with a different default channel at the bottom of your search results also so that there is an ad both at the top and the bottom of the search results. Also consider adding one to the ‘no results’ page.

Make sure that each time you ad an ad unit that you add a different channel code so you can track the results of these ads on your internal search pages.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make Money from Internal Search Traffic with Chitika

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Another product that they’ve been testing lately with a small group of testers is ‘Related Product Units’ (RPUs).

I’ve been one of the testers on these units and they’ve been responsible for a good increase in my Chitika earnings over the past week or two.

The RPU units are perhaps the most simple and easy to integrate ads that Chitika offers – they simply list three related products to the post you’ve written. Here’s how they look:

This screen cap of the RPU ads came from my recent review of the Fujifilm Finepix F30 (my new favorite point and shoot camera).

A click on the link brings in the revenue (CPC) and readers are taken directly to the advertisers page.

The code behind these ads is very similar to Chitika’s other ads.

As the ads are still in testing the code generation process is not really automated – you need to get the code from Chitika via email but I’m told they are generating an automated system that will spit out customized code as you need it.

How do they perform? At a glance – very very well. They integrate nicely into a site and as a result CTR is good. The cost per click amount is 50-70% lower than eMiniMall ads for some reason so that’s a downer and they do cannibalize from other ads on your page a little – but for the increase in income that they’ve brought in has outweighed the decrease in other ads on the page.

At this point RPU ads are still being tested but as I’ve seen them mentioned in their Support area and in their forums I thought I’d mention them as they seem to be going public about them.

Once again (and as with all Chitika ad units) these will work best on product related sites.

The only thing that I’d suggest that Chitika do with RPUs is consider some sort of note on them that they are ads like Google’s ‘ads by Gooooogle’ as they can look so integrated into sites that it’s not obvious what they are. This might decrease performance but it comes close to blurring the line between content and advertising.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika offer Related Products Unit

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Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika Launches Official Forum – Sphere

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This means that those who started referring people from the first month that it was possible to do so (around 12 months ago) now will continue to earn 10% of the earnings of those that they referred until the end of the year instead of having it end around now. Not bad considering the next three months are traditionally bumper months for online advertising.

Now if we can just get them to make it an ongoing indefinite deal….

Full details at Chitika Blog

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Chitika extends referral program to 15 months

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