The Affiliate Marketer’s Journal

In my last posting I talked about a new pay per click ad called service called eMiniMalls by Chitika. At the time I raved about how much money I was earning from their clicks compared to other ad services such as Google Adsense. However in the last paragraph I wrote:

As I haven’t been paid by Chitika yet I am not sure how many (if any) of my clicks will be reversed.

Well I was finally paid for October earnings yesterday and I was quite shocked by the auditing they did to my earnings. Apparently 36% of my targeted clicks were deemed invalid meaning that they were from non-supported countries or duplicate clicks. When I look at untargeted clicks it’s even worse. One day my earnings dropped from $65.02 to just $39.44. Apparently others have had similar results. According to a posting on Jensense one person lost 90% of their revenue due to the auditing. Pretty dramatic results. And worse we have to wait up to two months to see the results. That’s just not right. Coming from a programming background I know that it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to determine where a clicker is located in the world and credit the click only if they are in a supported country. And filtering duplicate clicks is even easier! Give me half an hour and I could code it.

To add insult to injury they recently reduced the clickable area in their ads to stop ‘curiosity clicks’. This has dropped my click through ratio a lot. And they implemented the change in a terrible way. Now some of the text looks like a link but not isn’t clickable. Way to confuse our visitors. On the plus side they said they will give us all a 10% bonus for November’s earnings.

Despite the disappointing results I have decided to keep running eMiniMalls for the time being. I am averaging $0.69 per targeted click, which is a little higher than Google is paying me. Plus they have posted a message on their blog indicating that they have released an alternate URL feature for unsupported visitors and are working on doing the auditing in near real-time. I suppose I should give them a break as it’s still pretty new technology.

Postscript - Determine Which Clicks Are Most Profitable
Here’s a quick way of see what clicks are earning you the most money with eMiniMalls. Add the following code after the line “ch_query = ” in the JavaScript block:

ch_sid = ch_query;

Then you’ll be able to see what your click through ratio is for each keyword and how much each keyword’s click earns you. It’s very useful information, especially if you are using eMiniMalls on untargeted traffic using their random keyword code.

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