Chitika Ads – Initial Impression
I heard about Chitika ads around November 1, 2009 and decided to try them out on one of my other websites. They are similar to adsense in the fact that you get paid for when ads are clicked. They are different in the following ways:
- Chitika ads do not pay you for multiple clicks from the same person/IP. I believe this is to reduce click fraud. But I am a little upset with this decision since as far as I know half of my earnings may disappear at the end of the month when they are audited.
- Chitika audits clicks at the end of the month. Durring this audit they make sure you aren’t being paid for multiple clicks from the same IP.
- Chitika ads seem to have set payout amounts. Where my earnings with Adsense have varried from like 8 cents to $1 per click, so far I am getting a steady 11.5 cents per click from chitika. I have read about other people getting different amounts (some only 5 cents per click) but it seems to be a trend that you get a set amount per click.
- Chitika Premium ads are based on the search result that brought a visitor to your website. On one hand this can be good because the ads are more likely to show what a visitor is looking for. … On the other hand, they are not very likely to be relevant to the content of your website.
- My Chitika Premium ads ONLY show up when people come from search engines. This is also a plus because it means my regular visitors who type in a URL or are referred by another website will not have to be distracted by the ads. These people wouldn’t have been as likely to click anyhow, so I’m not really loosing anything.
- Chitika has an amazingly low payout rate of $10 when you select PayPal. … With AdSense I have to wait until I reach $100 before getting a check.
Bad News: On the sad side, I have lost a little bit of my Google search results ranking since I added chitika to my website last week. I think this is just a coincidence, after all, how long can I expect to stay #2 out of 27 million for a term I am not even targeting? But I will have to look more into it over the next few weeks.
Overall Review
I have to say, my click through rates are about twice as high with chitika ads as they have been with AdSense. And if current trends keep up, I will have higher average monthly earnings thanks to them. Although, I think this is at least partially because I gave them better ad placement.
I will give them one thumbs up for now and re-rate them after I see how they perform over the course of a few months.
Chitika does offer a commission if you refer others, so if you do give them a try – feel free to use the links on this page
Hi – thank you for taking the time to write a review of your experience and first impression of Chitika.
I just wanted to clarify a few points you touched upon here for you and your readers. We have in set automatic fraud detection for things like clicks from the same IP, etc. This has pretty much eliminated our auditing process at the end of each month – so what you see is what you get.
You can read more here: http://chitika.com/blog/2008/11/21/chitika-audits-a-thing-of-the-past/
And for any fraud that does get through undetected, it is taken at the end of the month, however that number is very minimal (usually less than 1%).
One last thing, you had mentioned that you lost a bit of your Google revenue.. did you find that your TOTAL revenue (Chitika + Google) is now higher than what it was before using Google alone?
If so, than you know you are using Google and Chitika together as a good revenue boosting combination.
Best,
Karla Escolas
Chitika, Inc.
Thank you Karla. I did notice that my audited revenue didn’t go down any 🙂 That was very good news!
Also, I am happy to report that my search engine ranking went back up a bit after some small changes.
For the Google + Chitika combo … With AdSense alone I probably would have made around $6 in November 2009. By combining Google + Chitika, I watched my earnings climb to $8!
Very interesting and useful article. I would like to know more from you about chitika.