Chitika, the company I signed up with to display advertisements on my websites, recently changed the way they serve their banners. This is in an effort to minimize what they call curiosity clicks, or click-thru�s that do not lead to sale conversions on the merchant�s side.
Because of this change, I am rethinking if I should continue to use their service. There are several reasons for this; first is the mere fact Chitika modified their ads because the merchants were not happy with the results they were receiving. I do not see why I have to see a decrease in my clickthrough rate because the merchant�s website fails to convert the sale. What a reader does on that site is out of my control, but I did send them to the merchant�s site, so I should be compensated accordingly.
Secondly, the change Chitika made is now to not have links on the product�s name or image within the ad. 
If you take a look at the image to the right, you can see what are actually links in the ad. The merchant�s name, the product price, and the text �Best Deal at [merchant�s name]� are the only links and none of the three provide incentive to the end-user to click on the ad. The reason click-thru�s drop is because of the ads poor usability not because reader�s curiosity simply leads them to click on ads. Poor usability is probably the same reason some merchants fail to convert sales. Take a look at a page for a Sony PlayStation Portable on JR.com (J&R just happen to be selling the PSP for the lowest price listed on the ad). The product specific page is busy, confusing, and the site overall doesn�t project a trustworthy design for potential buyers. All things that known to fail ecommerce sites with consumers.
Another reason is that I have become skeptical of Chitika recently. The adminstration area of their service is basic, and apparently only copyrighted for 2004. Also, their blog, which uses an existing wordpress theme with no customization for company look & feel and that says �small time� to me. Not the ready for prime time service they claimed, in 2004. The other thing about their blog is that comments are allowed, but they are just not displayed on the posts related to this changing of ads issue. Looks like they do not want negative comments to appear on their blog, not cool in my book of �if you�re going to have a corporate blog�.
Hopefully Chitika changes their advertisements back to something useful to all parties involved and not weighted so much to merchants. I will keep the ads up until the end of the year to see if things change, but I doubt they will, at least for publishers.
November 27th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
my reactions to your reasons for considering leaving….
1. I think as publishers we need to be more than willing for Chitika to make the program not only beneficial to us but to advertisers. If the advertisers are not happy there will be no ads. I for one am willing to take a bit of a hit if it means there will be more advertisers joing the program as that will lead to higher click values.
2. Their Admin area is basic because they are really still in a beta test. I think you’ll find that they’ve already added some changes and that more are in the works to make it a better experience for publishers.
3. You have a point about their blog design - I think they should change that.
Overall I’m very happy with the ads - they do have a lower CTR than Adsense on most of my sites (not all) but their click value is as high as 5 times as much on some of my sites and as a result even though I have more adsense ads showing across my sites I earn three times as much from Chitika - even with the recent changes that they made. Of course I’ve worked very hard at making the keywords that I target as relevant to my topics as possible - I find most people don’t really think much about the type of ads that are showing and just put up the standard default ones.
Anyway - just my two cents worth.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Wow, you’re new blog really IS all about ads. IsoP