Google’s response was very sophisticated. It began to measure the performance of web sites’ users and pay less money to sites with low-value readers. Chitika’s was very simple. The company stopped supporting eMiniMalls and created a completely new kind of ad: one that would be shown only to users with the greatest interest.
This is revolutionary ... and a little unfair. It’s as though a store were to close its doors, hang up a sign saying “No time wasters,” and allow in only people who were actually going to buy. There are stores that do that, of course. Some outlets work only by appointment. The most expensive shops are designed in a way that puts off people who can’t afford the products. Night clubs have bouncers who help create an atmosphere of exclusivity. But on a web site, it’s not that simple.
That’s because your site isn’t the one being exclusive. Your site is still open to anyone who wants to read it. The exclusivity is falling entirely to Chitika and Chitika’s advertisers.
Chitika’s Premium units appear only to users in the United States and Canada who reach the site from a search engine (Figure 3.7). A user in India or Great Britain who visits your site won’t see your Chitika ad. Neither will a regular user—even one based in the United States—if he or she reaches your site directly, instead of visiting it after a search. Those users may see nothing in the ad spot, or they may see an “alternate ad”—a secondary ad that you choose to show when the Chitika ad isn’t available. That can be an AdSense unit.
Figure 3.7Chitika’s Premium ads come with pictures and a highlighted search term that make them hard to miss.
If a web site is like a giant mall with cash registers scattered around the floor, ready to pick up money from different kinds of shoppers, then Chitika is the exclusive, posh section at the back of the store. The best shoppers will find a great-looking spot waiting for them; regular shoppers will find a closed curtain ... and you’ll have to find another way to monetize them.
To get away with being this selective about its users, Chitika needs to have an exceptional product—and, fortunately, it does. Like the eMiniMalls, the Premium ads look like information boxes. They come with little pictures that attract the eye and have a tab that brings up a search box.
That search box is important. Chitika’s selectivity means that it always knows what visitors are searching for. It’s able to forget about scanning pages for keywords and looking at meta tags, titles, and subheadings to figure out context. It can simply take the search term and deliver a related ad.
The result is a much wider range of ads than Chitika used to make available, and exceptional targeting. And because users are actively searching for information, there’s a greater chance that they’ll click on the ad, providing high click-through rates for you and high returns for the advertiser.
As always, there are a few things you can do to make those returns even higher.
The first, of course, is implementation. The usual principles apply: Blend the ads into the site so that they look like part of your content, and users will be more likely to click on them.
Chitika allows publishers to change the colors of the title, text, and URL of the ad link. So make the title color the same as the color of your page’s subheadings, the text color the same as the color of your content, and the ad link blue.
You can also change the font of both the ad title and the text with these lines of code:
ch_font_title = “Arial”;
ch_font_text = “Arial”;
Again, make the fonts match the fonts on your site. And you can use this line to make sure that the advertiser’s page opens in a new window or tab, keeping your users on your site:
ch_target = “_blank”;
That should be pretty straightforward. A little trickier is where on the page you should put the units. While ads above the fold always do better than those hidden at the bottom, according to Karla Escolas, Chitika’s marketing manager, some publishers have found that placing an AdSense unit at the top of the page and a Chitika unit in the middle generates more revenue than AdSense alone. That’s something worth testing.
The real challenge is determining on which pages to put the code.
Chitika reps are pretty clear. They argue that to achieve the best results, the ad code should at least be placed on the site’s top five search pages. What you want to know, though, is what kind of ads you want to serve to your most valuable users. Do you want to send your North American search traffic to Chitika’s advertisers, or would you prefer them to head to AdSense advertisers, or even your own affiliates? If you know that those other advertisers will always pay more, you might want to avoid putting Chitika units on some pages so that you can better control where those particular users end up.
Again, this is something you’ll have to test. You’ll probably find that it pays to put Chitika’s ads on pages with products but that it pays more to focus on AdSense for your more general pages. Even with the company’s wider ad inventory, the best optimization, and the excellent appearance of its ads, Chitika units do look like ads, so they may well be easy to ignore on pages that aren’t about products.
In any case, unless you’ve come across a convincing reason to do otherwise, you should be choosing AdSense as the alternate for your Chitika ads. This is what will be shown to users who don’t reach the site from a search engine or who aren’t surfing from the United States or Canada.
If those users can’t see the Chitika ad, they will at least see an AdSense unit, giving you a good chance of turning them into money.
Another important point to remember about Chitika
