KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (13 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

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That’s because your site isn’t the one being exclusive. Your site is still open to anyone who wants to read it. The exclusivity is falling entirely to Chitika and Chitika’s advertisers.
 
Chitika’s Premium units appear only to users in the United States and Canada who reach the site from a search engine (
Figure 3.7
). A user in India or Great Britain who visits your site won’t see your Chitika ad. Neither will a regular user—even one based in the United States—if he or she reaches your site directly, instead of visiting it after a search. Those users may see nothing in the ad spot, or they may see an “alternate ad”—a secondary ad that you choose to show when the Chitika ad isn’t available. That can be an AdSense unit.
 
Figure 3.7
Chitika’s Premium ads come with pictures and a highlighted search term that make them hard to miss.
 
If a web site is like a giant mall with cash registers scattered around the floor, ready to pick up money from different kinds of shoppers, then Chitika is the exclusive, posh section at the back of the store. The best shoppers will find a great-looking spot waiting for them; regular shoppers will find a closed curtain ... and you’ll have to find another way to monetize them.
 
To get away with being this selective about its users, Chitika needs to have an exceptional product—and, fortunately, it does. Like the eMiniMalls, the Premium ads look like information boxes. They come with little pictures that attract the eye and have a tab that brings up a search box.
 
That search box is important. Chitika’s selectivity means that it always knows what visitors are searching for. It’s able to forget about scanning pages for keywords and looking at meta tags, titles, and subheadings to figure out context. It can simply take the search term and deliver a related ad.
 
The result is a much wider range of ads than Chitika used to make available, and exceptional targeting. And because users are actively searching for information, there’s a greater chance that they’ll click on the ad, providing high click-through rates for you and high returns for the advertiser.
 
As always, there are a few things you can do to make those returns even higher.
 
The first, of course, is implementation. The usual principles apply: Blend the ads into the site so that they look like part of your content, and users will be more likely to click on them.
 
Chitika allows publishers to change the colors of the title, text, and URL of the ad link. So make the title color the same as the color of your page’s subheadings, the text color the same as the color of your content, and the ad link blue.
 
You can also change the font of both the ad title and the text with these lines of code:
ch_font_title
=
“Arial”;
 
ch_font_text
=
“Arial”;
 
 
 
Again, make the fonts match the fonts on your site. And you can use this line to make sure that the advertiser’s page opens in a new window or tab, keeping your users on your site:
ch_target
=
“_blank”;
 
 
 
That should be pretty straightforward. A little trickier is where on the page you should put the units. While ads above the fold always do better than those hidden at the bottom, according to Karla Escolas, Chitika’s marketing manager, some publishers have found that placing an AdSense unit at the top of the page and a Chitika unit in the middle generates more revenue than AdSense alone. That’s something worth testing.
 
The real challenge is determining on which pages to put the code.
 
Chitika reps are pretty clear. They argue that to achieve the best results, the ad code should at least be placed on the site’s top five search pages. What you want to know, though, is what kind of ads you want to serve to your most valuable users. Do you want to send your North American search traffic to Chitika’s advertisers, or would you prefer them to head to AdSense advertisers, or even your own affiliates? If you know that those other advertisers will always pay more, you might want to avoid putting Chitika units on some pages so that you can better control where those particular users end up.
 
Again, this is something you’ll have to test. You’ll probably find that it pays to put Chitika’s ads on pages with products but that it pays more to focus on AdSense for your more general pages. Even with the company’s wider ad inventory, the best optimization, and the excellent appearance of its ads, Chitika units do look like ads, so they may well be easy to ignore on pages that aren’t about products.
 
In any case, unless you’ve come across a convincing reason to do otherwise, you should be choosing AdSense as the alternate for your Chitika ads. This is what will be shown to users who don’t reach the site from a search engine or who aren’t surfing from the United States or Canada.
 
If those users can’t see the Chitika ad, they will at least see an AdSense unit, giving you a good chance of turning them into money.
 
Another important point to remember about Chitika is that North American users who search on the site can see them, too. If they use a search box that you’ve placed on your Web pages, that search will be enough to trigger the code.
 
One very easy way to increase your Chitika earnings is to add an AdSense for search unit to your site and encourage your users to use it to find new content. That should help to turn your regular users into the kind of search traffic that Chitika likes so much. Because you can limit the search results to just your site, you’ll be able to keep your users on your pages, while still offering them more ads and creating the opportunity to offer them Chitika units, too.
 
Chitika is an unusual ad service. It’s not interested in converting all of your users, so it shouldn’t be used alone. That would mean leaving a valuable part of your web site unmonetized. Nor is it always the best solution, even for the users it takes—but often, it is. When Chitika works, it works very well and, combined with AdSense, it has been known to produce some very impressive results. The challenge for publishers is to place the ads—optimized, with an AdSense alternate, and in the middle of the top search result landing pages—and check the results.
 
For the right sites and in the right places, Chitika can have a very dramatic effect. You’ll want to know if your site is one of them.
 
Sign up for Chitika Premium at
Adsense-Secrets.com/chitika.html
.
 
YAHOO! PUBLISHER NETWORK
 
So far, all of the programs I’ve mentioned can work together. Both Chitika and Kontera are at their best when combined with AdSense. They provide another set of cash registers that you can use to pull money from your users. AdSense will always be the main cash desk, but Chitika and Kontera provide useful, additional channels to draw in cash. KaChing can come from lots of different places.
 
The Yahoo! Publisher Network (
www.publisher.yahoo.com
) is not compatible with AdSense. You’ll have to choose between the YPN network and AdSense. Usually, that’s a very simple choice: Go for AdSense (
Figure 3.8
).
 
Figure 3.8
The Yahoo! Publisher Network should have been a competitor to Google’s AdSense program. It didn’t happen.
 
I wish I could tell you that YPN is a real competitor. I’d really like to be able to say that if AdSense isn’t working for you, if it doesn’t serve the ads you want or if it thinks you’ve been clicking your own ads, then you should exercise your power as a consumer and take your business elsewhere. But when that elsewhere is YPN, you really can’t.
 
On the face of it, YPN is exactly the same as AdSense. By purchasing Overture in 2003 for $1.63 billion, the company that had pioneered paid search and inspired Sergey Brin and Larry Page, YPN made its intentions clear. Its ad units look very similar, with headlines, a line or two of text, and the advertiser’s URL. Yet YPN has only 10 formats to AdSense’s 12, and there are no link units. While you can change the colors of the ads, you can’t play with the fonts to improve optimization in the way that you can with AdSense.
 
Also, the program is open only to publishers in the United States.
 
That’s part of a worrying trend for YPN. The system has always been fairly restrictive, but the tendency now is toward shrinkage rather than growth. In February 2009, Yahoo! shut down its YPN in RSS feeds, one of the few advantages that the system had over AdSense (Google had started offering the same service the previous year), a move that followed the closure of ads in PDF files, another unique offering. The closures seemed to suggest that Yahoo! is focusing on its main products: Sponsored Search and the Content Match ads that make up its AdSense-style ad units.
 
Unfortunately for Yahoo!, its search engine has only a tiny share of the U.S. search market (just 8.91 percent in October 2009, about the same as Microsoft’s newcomer, Bing), and even that share is shrinking. The year before, Yahoo! had been able to pick up just over 12 percent of U.S. Internet searches. That doesn’t look good for Sponsored Search, and the prospects for Content Match aren’t great, either. In January of 2009, Yahoo! closed the service to European publishers.
 
Yahoo!’s financial troubles—and its attempts to fend off Microsoft—are no secret, and they throw a bit of a shadow over working closely with them. As the company pulls back its services to focus on the highest-earning parts of the Web, there’s always the fear that small publishers may one day be left high and dry. Your ad systems should be the foundation of your Internet revenues, the money you can rely on month after month so that you can experiment with other channels that have higher risks and higher rewards. You don’t want to find that one of your most important revenue channels has suddenly been cut off because a company in trouble looks to make more savings.
 
Fortunately, that’s not likely to happen ... because YPN just doesn’t deliver the results that allow most publishers to rely on them. The general feeling among publishers is that Yahoo! delivers poor click-through rates. While the company once made up for that with higher-than-average payments for clicks, those rates have since fallen. The result is that, in a straight comparison, Yahoo! usually performs worse than Google. Its KaChing doesn’t ring.
 
There are things that you can do to improve performance. Implementation, of course, is important, but a big part of the YPN’s problem is that its contextualization engine isn’t very accurate or very fast. There’s a good chance that users will be seeing run-of-network (RON) ads instead of contextualized ads. These are ads that are offered when the system can’t decide what it should be serving. They’ll have nothing do with your site, and the payments (if you get any at all) will be very low. One way to prevent that from happening and to bring in ads you want is to use “ad targeting.”
 
This is something that’s unique to YPN, and it lets you select the advertising categories that you think would interest your readers most. There are about 20 categories and 127 subcategories to choose from. You can even place one page in one category and another page in a second category.

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