Chitika Offers a Different Take on Ads
Chitika has been on the scene for over five years now, but I still find that a lot of webmasters have never heard of them. So, here’s an introduction. Chitika is an advertising company. They place ads on your site using a snippet of Javascript just like Google does with AdSense. Unlike AdSense and its numerous clones, the ads here are for specific products and are not just blocks of text.
Chitika has three very different ad offerings. The one I’ve had the most success with is Chitika|Premium. This ad unit it similar to AdSense in that it is a target rectangle of ads on your page. It is unlike AdSense in that it is targeted based on the search engine queries that lead people to that page. Now, this means a couple of things. First, it means that the ads only show up when someone gets to a page directly from a search engine. You can supply something to put there at other times or it can disappear or be filled with untargeted ads. AdSense is a nice backup. Second, it means the offers are targeted to what your visitors are looking for at that moment. This is good in terms of click-through, so it is good for your bottom line.
The second type of ad is very different from AdSense. Chitika | Linx picks words and phrases from your pages to target on. Those phrases are marked with a double underline and ads are shown as popup divs when the user moves their cursor over them. Chitika claims this is compatible with AdSense’s terms of service, so you could toss this in the mix without turning off Google first. I haven’t tested this one as much, but it seems promising.
The third ad unit they have is an interesting idea, but it just didn’t work very well for me. These are called WhitespaceAds and they are ad placed off to the side of your web site to take advantage of extra real estate on wide screen monitors. A clever idea to be sure (assuming your site doesn’t just spread out wider), although maybe readers just didn’t feel like looking too far to the right. In any case, I’m sure mileage varies so maybe this will work better for you.
All told, how well does it do? For me, I found Chitika’s eCPM was higher than with, say, BuzzLogic or Bidvertiser, but still a bit lower than with AdSense. That said, I’ll keep them in mind for new sites and will play with Linx a bit more to see if it can squeeze out a few extra bucks here and there.
More information can be found at www.Chitika.com.
In the interest of disclosure, I should admit two things. First, the title of this article is a bad pun, as “Chitika” means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu. I should also admit that I used to work with Chitika co-founder Venkat Kolluri, so I know he’s a good guy.
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