I recently got an email from the
folks at Chitika which informed me that I could
make referral commissions on anybody I refer to Chitika for a full 15 months.
They even provided me a shortcut link to send my referral link out to Twitter.
But, is Chitika really any good?
I have been using Chitika for
some time over on PCMech.com. I do not put very much into the program and it
has been very much one of my minority income streams. But, even without putting
much into it, I have been making a couple hundred dollars per month with it. It
might not be much, but considering how little “face time” it gets with my
readers, I’m not complaining. And surely, if I took the time to optimize it, I
could probably increase my monthly income fairly easily through Chitika.
If you’re not familiar, Chitika
is a company which delivers search-targeted ads. The ads are completely
compatible with Google Adsense and does not compete, so you don’t have to worry
about running Chitika and Adsense on the same pages. Whenever a
user clicks into your site via a search engine, Chitika will deliver that user
a targeted ad block based on the keywords used to find your website. So, it is
super-well targeted. And as of just a few days ago, they are no longer auditing traffic using these types of ads. The
auditing process has been a source of frustration for publishers because it
usually means your actual monthly income ends up being less than what your
stats showed.
This is the kind of ad I am
running on PCMech, which means the ads are only visible when the site is
entered from a search engine. If you go directly to the site or click in from
another site, you will see no ad from Chitika.
These ads have been working extremely well for Chitika, so much so that it
appears as if they are now making this ad type their priority. When you log in
as a publisher, this is the kind of ad you will see first. Only when you click
the link for other ad types will you see the other options, including Lynx (contextual ads ala Kontera), whitespace ads (which use your site’s white
space on larger screen resolutions), theeMiniMall and the Multiple Product Unit (or MPU). Those last two are PPC
ads which lead primarily to products.
The other ad types they’ve
offered have been pretty disappointing in the past and this is the primary
reason Chitika hasn’t gotten much play on PCMech.com. The ads they’ve given
were poorly targeted and generated very little revenue. So, I’m not surprised
at all that their Premium search-targeted ads are working so well. They
alleviate the problem of poor targeting. With the new ad types, my CTR climbed
dramatically and my income climbed to the point that it is.
Chitika works best when (1) you
have a lot of incoming traffic from search engines, and/or (2) you have a
product oriented website which people come to when looking for particular kinds
of products (i.e. a review site). Additionally, you can make money by referring
people to Chitika. That won’t work for everybody, but for some it can.
So, if you’re running a site and
want to try making some extra month with it, I would recommend Chitika. I’m
still not making enough from Chitika to justify replacing any of my other ad
sources with Chitika, but specifically targeting my search traffic makes a lot
of sense and it does provide a little boost to my income. If you run a review
site, you could probably make a killing with Chitika. As anybody in this
business will tell you, you want a bunch of different income streams and, for
me, Chitika is one of them.
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