My newest “test tube” article is going to feature a little test on Chitika’s premium ads (if you’re not up to speed on what I’m trying to accomplish with my “test tube” articles, please click here for a brief overview).
Chitika has been offering content publishers an Adsense-compatible ad solution (originally called “eminimalls”) since 2005. I’ve been using Chitika ads in the “eminimall” format on UltimateFatBurner.com pretty much since their inception.
And, while I never found the ads to perform exceptionally well (to be fair, they always played a secondary role on my site, with Adsense occupying the ideal advertising “real estate” positions on my pages), they didn’t interfere with Adsense revenue, and stuffed a few extra dollars into the pockets of my jeans each month.
Now, eminimalls are “old school”; Chitika’s main offering is its “Premium Ads” service. It’s a pretty cool concept; these are “collapsible” ads that deliver extremely targeted advertising to visitors who arrive to a page directly as a result of a Search Engine (SE) query.
If a visitor arrives to a page from an SE, a targeted ad is displayed. If she arrives from another page on your site, no ad is displayed and the ad collapses in on itself, so the visitor sees nothing (you can opt to have the ad display a non-targeted ad or an ad from an alternative service in this case).
Here, for example, is a page that has a 468 X 60 banner placed directly below the main title tag on the page. But you don’t see it, right? Now on the other hand, here’s a page that has the same ad in place, showing what will be displayed if a visitor arrives via a SE query for the word “mortgage.”
Pretty cool, huh?
Now, I’ve never really messed around with Chitika’s Premium Ad service much. Frankly, I didn’t need to. But now, with advertising revenue sinking like a stone, I figured it would be the perfect time to run a little experiment to see how it performs and whether a large-scale rollout is warranted.
So here’s what I’m going to do…
I’m taking 10 high-traffic pages from UltimateFatBurner.com, and placing a 468 X 60 collapsible banner directly below the title (as demonstrated here). I’m going track the results for a month, and report the results back to you. We’ll see how the Premium ads compare to the “regular” ones displayed on the site.
A couple of things to consider that may impact the sort of results I attain…
1) Visitors might be more open to an extremely targeted ad AFTER they have perused the page’s content. In this case, would the banner ad perform better placed at the end of the article, rather than the beginning? It may be worthwhile to run the experiment again to see for sure (incidentally, Chitika staff recommend placing the ads at the beginning of your content).
2) A larger ad size may generate significantly more response from your audience. Not only are they harder to skim by, because of their size they can present more offers – increasing the likelihood that one may appeal to your visitor. Chitika staff, for example, strongly recommend using a larger ad size than what I am using here.
However, I am extremely focused on balancing ad revenue without being intrusive and infringing on my vistor’s experience. I can certainly tolerate the small banner illustrated above, but in my opinion, the larger ad sizes are too intrusive to use at the top of the page.
To read the first follow-up to the “Great Chitika Premium Experiment” click here!
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