A few months back, I started messing around a little more seriously with Chitika’s Premium Ad service (which displays targeted advertising to visitors arriving directly from a Search Engine – visitors navigating through your site will not see the ads) on UltimateFatBurner.com to see how it would perform (if you’re not “up to speed” on the great Chitika discussion, I recommend reviewing the original post, and my follow up post).
Initially, I placed a small (468 X 60) ad directly below the H1 heading on 10 top-performing pages on UltimateFatBurner.com and tracked the data for a month. The results were uninspiring (no difference in CTR or eCPM) although not entirely surprising. The Chitika representatives I have communicated with have always emphasized the importance of using a larger sized ad format – in a prominent position – if one is to expect a dramatic increase in ad metrics.
That said, I repeated the experiment, but this time using a much larger (550 X 120) ad format. Once again, I placed the ad prominently at the top of the page, just below the H1 heading tag.
The results?
Although I can’t report specifics (I don’t want to run afoul of Chitika’s Term and Conditions and jeopardize my account in any way), here’s what I can tell you…
1) Click through rate (CTR): Increased by approximately 350%.
2) Earning Per Thousand Impressions (eCPM): Increased by approximately 350%.
3) Average Cost Per Click (CPC): Increased by just over 13%.
Pretty cool, huh?
Of course, my numbers still are not fantastic (and not yet on par with Google’s Adsense) but they are getting there. And I’m not arguing with a three-plus-fold increase in Chitika revenue. In fact, in the face of these results, I’ve begun a rollout of similar Chitika ads (480 X 180) on the Body Building subdomain of UltimateFatBurner.com. Although I don’t have enough data to accurately assess their performance yet, it certainly appears that they are converting visitors at a similar rate to the slightly larger ads used in this experiment.
I’ll be doing a similar rollout through the remainder of the site over the next few months.
What about my concerns that these large, “top-of-page” ads are intrusive, and infringe on the visitor’s surfing experience?
So far, there has been little real evidence to indicate that this is the case. No one has e-mailed me to complain, and Google’s Analytics software doesn’t show any change in the “Bounce Rate” or the “% Exit” data for the pages included in the experiment.
In other words, placing large Premium Chitika ads prominently on UltimateFatBurner.com does not appear to have any negative effects.
My conclusion, therefore, is straight-forward. When the correct sized ad is placed in the appropriate prominent position, ad metrics are dramatically improved.
And that, in my books anyway, counts as a WIN. 
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