Update To Chitika eMiniMalls Posting
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.
I had posted a comment at another blog, some minutes ago, that I didn’t know if I’d ever even heard of “Chikita”… But following the link to their site from here, it looks like a site that I may have come across just the other day - and bookmarked, for possible future reference. (With all that’s been happening around this time of the semester, it’s hard to tell… ;-).
Perhaps now, it won’t be worth looking into Chikita… But the thing is, I don’t know much about these topics. Would you say that, for a student who has a personal weblog, without a very high amount of traffic, that Google’s Adsense would be the best?
Honestly both Adsense and Chitika probably aren’t the best solution for you as personal blogs. Think about it.. When was the last time you clicked on an ad on a personal blog?
Instead I’d recommend you take a different approach. Have a blog posting about a product, site or service you’ve used. For example next time your printer runs out of ink buy some cartridges at ABCInk then post about the product you received. Make sure all your links to their site are affiliate links and I’m sure you’ll get a few sales from your visitors. And trust me, sales are worth a lot more than clicks.
But if you want to chose between the two services I’d say go with Google. They have a larger inventory and their ads aren’t all about selling products. But expect to wait several months to get a single cheque.
Hi Craig,
Have you been keeping track of which clicks get the most return? I am looking for product categories like Computers, Photography, Kitchen Appliances etc. In one of your post you said that you were making nearly $1 per target click. Then in your next post you said somthing like $.68 each. Can you confirm it was indeed close to $.68 per click and what category?
What you may not know is that Chitika has created their eminimalls around shopping.com’s API. I use shopping.com’s api also (on camera-prices.com) and I know how much each category gets per click and I also know what percentage shopping.com takes off for “double clicks” etc. I am asking these questions in hopes to ask shopping.com to anti up on my next contract - if other sites are getting more revenue share - a shopping.com term in the contract. I imagine the highest revenue share Chitika is getting is around 80% - the most shopping.com pays out according to my contacts.
If a merchant is willing to pay $.75 to list his store and if Chitika displays it on your site and a user clicks on the offer, then essentially Chitika just made $.75×80%x(1-duplicates%). Then, your cut might be a percentage of what Chitika makes. I have heard some people saying they make 5% of Chitika’s cut, which is no where near $.68. The highest category for cpc is in the office and computer categories which do get upto $1 and maybe more if merchants are bidding for top position. But, I have found that Chitika is not listing the top merchant nor the best price, so I am not sure what there algo is. In the shopping.com contract we are required to display the natural results from shopping.com’s api, which puts the highest bidder on top. Saying that, Chitika must have a unique contract. I would appreciate any info you can provide on the above questions. If you like I can share a bit more stats from my end as well.
Thanks,
Elvis