Considering to try out another new advertising program? There are new advertising programs going live weekly but, how do you instantly see whether any of the ad programs has potential or not? This is a video tutorial containing 4 tips of criteria which help you to instantly see whether the ad program is good.

1. Relevancy is the key

Relevancy is extremely important. Only with relevant ads you have the following benefits:

• High Click Through Rate (CTR)
  • Ads are interesting to your visitors
  • Less banner blindness, people are interested
• Higher cost per click (CPC)
  • Clicks convert better for the advertiser
  • Thus click is worth more as ROI is higher
• Ads are less aggressive
  • Because your visitors are interested they don’t mind more ads.

2. Are you able to customize the ads?

We live in the age of banner blindness with visitors no longer being web newbies. If we are able to customize our ads by using different formats and colors we have the following advantages.

• We can blend our ads
  • Ads look less like ads and more like content. => more and higher quality clicks
• We can customize the ad to match our website’s design
• We can use different formats matching our content.

3. How much do we actually get?

Some advertising program take all the money which the advertisers invest – we want as much as possible. If your advertising program takes extremely much, then don’t go for it. Their tactic should actually be to pay you as much as possible to get as many publishers as possible – unfortunately many advertising programs don’t understand the advantages of both more publishers and advertisers. Low payout? Don’t go for it.

4. How is the support?

Support is important, we will have questions asking for assistance, if there is no support then what? I really enjoy having an account manager whom I can contact via skype with any questions I have.

If the advertisement offers you all that, then go for it. Relevancy is most important tough, that’s what you should check out first.

It’s an average morning on an average day while surfing the web for some info, and by checking out other websites for this we sometimes stumble upon publishers which are screwing their ad campaign around.

Bad ad placements and colors will not get you the money which you could be getting out of your website if you would place them correctly…. colors are important as well – however placements are even more crucial. In our previous post about the best AdSense placements we discussed various placements and ad designs including colors – using case studies and theories as our backup.

Update: It seems that the discussed site’s layout and css has been fixed. However our optimization tips still apply apart from the site’s design changes.

Bad AdSense Placements

How to Fix bad Ad Placements

As always, this will be included in our complete AdSense guide and it will serve as an example for other webmasters who publish ads. We made a list below which includes all the implementations suggested by us. You can use this a reference for your own website(s).

• Footer Advertisements

Probably the most infamous placement for an ad – the footer. Placing your ad here will not only get it NOT noticed, it will also take 1 contextual ad away from the 3 you can have per page. We can understand why people place their ads there, thrown away in corners. The ads are ugly – and in most cases destroy the layout and design of your website. We can only agree, however if you joined an advertisement program, you want to make money online – which won’t be possible if you tuck the ads away in the bottom. Do a little reading on the best adsense placements post we blogged earlier this week and you’ll understand why.

• Sidebar Placements

The sidebar has many placements for any kind of ad, be it direct advertising, affiliate or CPC ads. The problem with the sidebar is that CPC ads will only perform if they are placed above the fold. In this case we talk about AdSense, so blending your ad in the sidebar is important as well.
“Sponsors” and “Advertisement” is often used as a title above the ad in the sidebar. This is used because the site has a large readerbase and it will be easier for them to distinguish content from advertisements. Other sides which get a lot of search traffic would benefit more from removing the title above the ad, making the ad looking more like content, resulting in higher CTR.

Also be aware, the more down on the page you place your ads (especially skyscrapers) the less they get clicked because most visitors don’t scroll down that far. As you can see on the heatmap, placing them above the fold will get you the most clicks because they are placed in the hot zones.

• Coloring your Ad

Red title color, black text and a violet url color. Awesome combination to draw the attention to the ad. However it will most likely scare away the visitor from clicking it because it looks like an ad. Visitors do not like to get monetized, do you? That’s why we need to blend it with our content, making it not look like an ad. Picking a red title color while every other link on that site is blue/black is definitely a good way to make an ad outstanding but not make it perform.

As part of our complete AdSense guide on DuoBlogger we devoted several post – each more progressively detailed – to coloring your adsense units.

• Different Ad Formats

Leaderboards are, although under performing, still as popular as in web 1.0. It is important to understand why leaderboards died several years ago since the internet made it’s big boom. The average internet user got used to anything banner related advertising, making them not click the banners anymore. Have a look on Jakob Nielsen’s Banner Blindness research, and scroll down to the images. What can we see here?

Banner Blindness - notice the ads outlined in green

The people that took part in the experiment all took a little peek at the leaderboard and skyscrapers but weren’t interested in it at all. Now let’s get back to this – the main reason people visit your website is because of the content you share. Now wouldn’t it be smart (note: image) to insert ads inside your content, making it more likely people won’t read over them because all their attention is focussed there.

As of web 2.0 – rectangles and squares are the new and best performing ad formats.

Chitika – sounds like a banana, but stands for one of the best CPC programs out there. We’ll give you a nice Chitika review here, one thing to start, sign up for Chitika, you’ll not regret it. Finishing our Chitika review you’ll understand why…

There are good and bad advertising programs in terms of revenue for the publisher. Good ones in general are Google AdSense, YPN, Adsdaq and ….. Hmm well, can’t think of any other good advertising programs. I have been testing a couple of programs and most of them are just crap. They try to copy Google AdSense and fail greatly because they will never be able to have more advertisers than AdSense. They aren’t innovative. Good news, Chitika is a new, innovative and good CPC program.

What’s special about Chitika?

Relevancy for local Pizza ads

To understand why Chitika is a good advertising program you need to understand in which particular situations Google AdSense is unable to bring the publisher good revenue. Google AdSense puts everything into displaying content relevant ads, which is a good idea hence that way both publisher and advertiser earn more money. Less relevant ads means less conversions after clicking on the ad resulting in less revenue for the advertiser and consequently less money for the publisher. Now comes the part what makes Chitika special: Chitika does not scan the content of the page to display relevant ads, they scan the search strings which were used to enter the website.

By just looking at for example “Pizza in New York” compared to thousands of lines of unnecessary code Chitika is able to display extremely relevant ads. Sometimes even more relevant than Google AdSense (more at the end of this review)…..

By displaying relevant ads they are able to pay the publisher top CPC rates because the Return of Investment for the advertiser is very high (advantage of content relevant ads). One example: Dating ads on a website about insurance will most likely result in absolutely no conversions. It’s very easy to test how relevant your Chitika ads will be. Go to a website who runs Chitika ads and append “#chitikatest=New York Pizza” to the end of the URL, press enter and reload the website. You should then see advertisements about whatever you entered, in my case New York Pizza. If you are looking for a URL then just go to Wikihow. One special example I would like to point out is this url. The drink “New York Egg cream” is something special for New York. Have a look on the link and then compare the relevancy of the AdSense ads with the relevancy of the Chitika ads. Google only shows general new york ads whereas Chitika shows ads of local stores. Amazing isn’t it?

Chitika’s Ad Layout

Psychologically optimized ads

When I first had a look on the default layout of Chitika’s ads I was amazed. I previously made a post about psychological AdSense optimization where I talked about colors and all that. The layout is extremely important as it decides whether the user clicks on the ad  or doesn’t.

Chitika offers all methods of optimizing your ads, changing the title color, text color, border color and URL color. That’s of course what Google offers as well but there is one significant difference. Google’s TOS disallows placing images next to your advertisements because they think that that could somehow encourage the user to click the ads. What’s the big deal? That only means more money. The visitor sees the image and then automatically focuses the ad unit next to it resulting in more clicks. That’s a clever trick which Chitika automatically implements. Check out the picture, Chitika automatically displays relevant images next to the ads! Amazing, I was stunned when I saw that the first time. That of course means more revenue for you.

How much revenue can the Chitika publisher expect?

First thing we talked about was the relevancy of the ads. The relevancy is the main factor for high CPC. Chitika is able to display relevant ads as I showed you above. The result is a CPC as high as together with AdSense. I even have a higher CPC on my gaming site with Chitika than with AdSense. That’s because AdSense performs really poor for everyone in the Gaming niche. The CPC you can expect lays anywhere between 75 and 125 percent of your AdSense CPC.

Next factor is the Click Through Rate (CTR), by allowing major customizations and placing images next to the ads the Chitika CTR lays somewhere between 100 and even up to 250 percent of your AdSense CTR. Please keep in mind that most people don’t use Chitika to replace AdSense but as an additional ad on the website. Look at Wikihow above, they are using 3 AdSense content units and 1 Chitika unit near the footer. The footer is a relatively bad placement (see the heat map), but still the owner reported a CTR of above 1 percent, which is tremendous! By using Chitika as additional source of income you are able to increase your total earnings by 10-20 percent. Do you want to miss that?

For which sites does Chitika perform best?

No text content?

Chitika performs very good for all websites. The sites AdSense performs bad for are the sites Chitika performs very good for. Poor text-content websites for example.

The AdSense crawler is unable to find any content to display AdSense ads on video sites for example. They are not able analyze the video, they can only check out the description of the video, the title, the tags or the comments. In a lot of cases those aren’t however that relevant. Chitika is able to display relevant ads for the visitor by just analyzing the tiny search string which reveals what the visitor was actually looking for!

All websites work well together with Chitika, the best websites are in my opinion video sites and also local sites (see the Pizza example above).

In terms of CPC the same niches as with AdSense peform best. That’s simply because the ROI for the advertiser is high (the advertiser earns a lot if someone purchases something) and resulting in spending more money into ad-campaigns. Car sites, Insurance sites, medical sites, foreclosure sites, lawyer sites, local sites and a lot more perform really good. Low paying niches are the same as together with AdSense, but that’s not the fault of the advertising program, it’s the problem of the niche. My niche is relatively low paying but still I am earning more than before.

Interview with Chitika Account Manager

I was so stunned by Chitika that I immediately started writing on this blog post and thought “Hey! Why not talk to someone from the Chitika company?”. Two days later Vik Chhabra (@vikc) joined me in an interview overviewing and explaining Chitika. Of course also all the benefits Chitika has were subject of the talk. Thanks again to you for the informative interview!

The video is in HD by default, you can turn it off in the player if your internet connection is too poor performing (I have a friend who still downloads at 30 kb / second LOL). Feel free to contact Vik in case you are interested in joining Chitika, he will assists you with all the questions you have and setting up your Chitika account. Make sure to mention that you came from us and he will put you on his top priority list!

We found another nice interview with Alden DoRosario (@adorosario) on the SESNY. Worth watching, good information:

Others on Chitika

There are a lot of positive and of course negative comments from other people on Chitika. Here are some found on the Chitika site itself:

Brandon from FitBuff.com said: I had heard good things about Chitika, but it was just one of those things that I never quite got around to checking out. Finally, I went to the website, had the code installed in minutes, and Chitika instantly became one of my top revenue sources in the first month! There was literally no learning curve or optimization, so I’m sure my results will be even better once I delve deeper. I simply input the code in the appropriate spot, and I was done. One of the best things about the ads is that they are only shown to visitors who arrive at my site via search engines, so the “regular readers” aren’t bogged down by more ads, even though Chitika is earning nearly as much as the ads that are always visible!

Arnold Alting from downloads.nl said: Chitika | Premium works great for us. A good Google Adsense alternative with very well targeted ads.

Carl from carlpei.com said: The best part of Chitika has to be the support! I have Ryan from Chitika on my MSN list and he’s always ready to chat. I’m a small publisher, this gives a very personal feeling.

@TomRoyce from House Meets Owner said: I use Chitika on a hobby site and it earns 3x more than adsense does for the same # impressions.

@trentiles from Dubs in the Buff said: Only have been using Chitika for a few days. So far good experience but I wish I could customize the ads more such as borders, etc.

We recently placed a thread on our forum about removing the borders from Chitika ads.

Own Experience

I have been using Chitika for almost a month now, mainly to get away from AdSense as only source of income. My website is in the gaming niche not a that good niche in terms of advertising because of the young audience and no really expensive products. Nonetheless my Chitika CPC is 30 percent higher than my AdSense CPC, which stunned me at first because AdSense was priorly the program that got me the highest CPC. Looking at my monthly revenue now around 20 percent comes from Chitika which is not that much of course. But considering that only 10 percent of my search engine visitor see the ads and generate 20 percent of my total income then yes, that’s a nice in earnings. I am really satisfied.

Signup for Chitika

We hope that we were able to bring Chitika a littler closer to you. You probably still have lots of unanswered questions but don’t wonder, every advertising program is like a unique new world. We can only recommend you to sign up for Chitika and test it yourself, it’s free of course.

This is my first video post, a short video about optimizing your Adsense with psychological factors in mind. Adsense can be compared to shopping-mall psychology hence it is every important to choose the proper layout and positioning of Adsense. I experimented for more than 2 years and made the experience that a bad layout can get you 10 clicks and a good layout around 150 clicks per day.

Now that you watched the video I would like to add a short summary: the colors are very important. For me #000080 worked better than the standard title color #0000FF. If you ask me then that’s the same phenomenon as banner blindness. People get used to the colors and immediately identify your ads as real ads. Some people suggest to make the Title-color the same as the link color on your website but I made the experience that a solid blue still works best. All links are blue and that’s why blue Adsense links also perform best. Of course, make sure to test this method as well hence it could be that this method gets you most clicks on your website. There is no general formula, everything depends on your website.

Make your ads not look like ads
People don’t click advertisements unless they are super relevant, or the content is so bad that the ads are more relevant than the content. Especially the younger generation got extremely used to advertisements and learned to live with them. They are very hesitant and won’t click them unless they don’t notice that they are actually clicking an ad. Of course, this also means more false-clicks but that is another topic. The first step would be to change the text color of your Adsense units to the color of the your website’s text.

Make the borders go
Yes, we want our ads to look like content. To achieve that we need to make sure that both border and background color are the same as the background color of your website. In fact, there is no reason for using borders. They don’t look good at all and won’t even attract clicks because they make every ad look Adish. I never used them and will never do so which means that you shouldn’t do as well.

Hide your URL-Color
The URL color makes every ad look very Adish and as said above: adish looking ads aren’t clicked. When people see another URL standing somewhere then they will notice that they are actually facing an ad and are hesitant to click. We want people to only look on the Adsense tital – because that’s where they should click on. The first impression counts and the title is most important for the click. If we are able to draw all the attention to the title then the people will click it because the title looks like a link plus is related. However, if we let the user look on the “ads by google” or the URL then they will notice that they are actually looking on an ad and won’t click. Make the URL color the same as the text. For me a grey (#CCCCCC) or the same color as the Adsense unit’s text color perform best.

Change the positiongs
It is very important to move your Adsense units to where your users actually look at. Adsense introduced a heatmap at which location ads perform best. The heatmap is based on psychological factors as humans tend to look to the left of the page first and then move their attention to the center and then to the actual content. Those locations are the top-performing locations. If you are able to put your ads in your content, or on top of your site (like me with D3scene in the video) then you will get a lot of clicks, simply because people will look at the advertisements. Never use any sort of footer advertisements. “Gurus” recommended to do so in the Web 1.0 era, but that is no longer up to date.

Conclusion
Summing it up you should have learned that colors and placements of your Adsense units are two major factors for the CTR (click through rate) of your ads. Using large rectangles looking like content with no surrounding borders is the way to get most clicks. Blue link colors are performing best. Make sure to test your changes for at least a week to see whether your changes were good or not. Adsense requires a lot of testing. I never stop testing, there is always something that could perhaps up the revenue a little.

Some bloggers are relatively unsatisfied with Google Adsense or other advertisement networks. You must know that there are other, still good networks. The market grows fast and still has open space for new advertising companies. I have been using several advertisement programs now and would like to give you some tips which advertisement programs are good.

You gotta decide between PPC (also known as CPC, stands for Pay per click), PPA (also known as CPA, stands for pay per affiliate and CPM (PPM, pay per impression). Some blogs tend to work better with CPA programs, others with CPC programs and others with CPM programs.

I made the experience that CPC programs run best when you have a niche blog. Your blog should not be about different topics, only about one. That way the CPC-programs can easily put related advertisements on your website which then tend to be clicked by your visitors more often. One very good advertising program is Google Adsense (you probably know it, if not you must be a newby lol). Because of the intense amout of advertisers Google is able to put extremely relative ads on your websites. As said before, the advertisements are appealing to the visitors and will consequently get clicks. To make it a little easier to understand: Let’s say your blog is about lawyers in a district of New York – there is an advertiser interested in putting advertisements on websites about exactly that topic. The ads are shown the user and they click on them because they were looking for a lawyer. Always keep in mind that the success to Google Adsense is the niche relevancy and the amount of clicks. The more clicks, the more money. The relevanter the better earnings per click (general sites suffer from smart pricing). I have mainly worked with Google as CPC program, but alternatives are Yahoo, Bidvertiser and some others of which I currently forgot the names.

The next category of advertisement are CPM ads. Those advertisements will get you money per impression. Sounds great because it is independent on clicks, however, those advertisement programs usually tend to pay out less. They do not have as targeted ads as the CPC programs, therefore do not have a large ROI (return on investment) for the advertiser. For me they pay out around 50% of what google-adsense pays. Usually you are forced to use those programs simply because you either got banned on adsense, or notice that your money per click gets lowered drastically. I worked togehter with some of them and made best experiences with: Adsdaq and Tribalfusion. If you need wellpaying pop-unders then Valueclick is the network to go. Their pop-unders pay out like on no other network. Cpxinteractive is good if you want income without really doing something. Just place their code and you can expect medium-earnings. The prior networks pay out well if you dedicate some time to play around a little. I will be writing a post about ad tiering for more money soon (helps to get more money out of CPM ads).

An alternative might be CPA advertisements for you. There some niches that are known to payout very well with affiliate advertisements. The dog niche for example will make you rich with CPA ads… You probably ask yourself why – in fact I did so too… It is fairly easy to understand – look at the audience of people that are interested in dogs. Most of them are 30+ and already have an income. Those people have money and usually (at least in Western-countries) do everything possible for the health and good of their pet. Those people are eager to buy products, the conversion rate is extremely high. An example: A dog is suffering from a disease – the person owning the dog searches for help on the internet and then finds your website. The person sees an advertisement related directly to her problem. The chance is high that she will click it and perhaps buy the product. So if the product costs around 500$ (some people pay that for the good of their dog) – then you get around 15% – what is 75$. Some friends told me that their sites where extremely well converting with a conversion rate of almost 5%! Wish I had such a blog and could run CPA advertisements hehe. Popular ones are the Ebay Commission Junction, Amazon-ads or Google Adsense. I have once been trying Zanox – but they scammed me around 200$. I am still waiting for a payout. Would love to know if you made better experiences with them.

CPA advertisements really depend on the niche – for example on my main website (it is about computer games – D3scene.com) – I would not be able to make any profit from Affiliate advertisements. The audience is maily around 15 years old. Most of the users do not even have a credit-card or paypal account. The chance that they really buy the product is very low. And the money behind a computer-game is not higher than 50$ – making it unattractive for gaming niches to run CPA ads.

Another possibility if your blog is about a specific software would be to use Pay-Per-Install advertisements. Those advertisements get you money whenever someone installs software. However, you will need to merge the software’s .exe with some kind of sponsor program .exe – which will make the audience of your blog never come back. Trust me, if a website tries to install crap on my computer I will NEVER even open them again. Zangocasg is the most popular one.

All in all you need to experiment – there is no 100% perfect advertising solution for your blog. The advertising niche changes every year and has new products which might increase your money. I recommend you to try out different advertisement programs and to see which one performs best for your blog. Not that I know everything, but I already know a decent amount – still – there is so much that influences your advertisements and I can not tell you the perfect solution. As stated above – experiment.

This is a summery from my post: Adsense Optimization