Chitika

Is a viable alternative to Google Adsense that is also in the contextual advertising space and I currently use them. I chose this as an alternative in case I ever ran into an issue with Google and got barred for some reason as well as to have diversity, back to that multiple income sources, in advertising services. Chitika is actually easier to apply for and get accepted than Google. However, and this is a big, however, it is not the most intuitive to establish or begin to locate ads on your site. They look similar in that the ads have code displayed that you add to your website but the similarities stop there. Chitika has a plugin for WordPress (my sites are built on WordPress) but I could not figure it out, which is not to say that the plugin does not work, I just couldn’t figure it out. I’ve created a Youtube video that demonstrates how to apply Chitika ads to your WordPress site using three different plugins that I’ve found quite helpful and useful.

That criticism aside, I really like Chitika’s reporting structure. It reports similar to Adsense in that it displays the number of page views and impressions. But where it really stands out for me is in displaying the number of ads that were blocked (for some reason) from your site or the number of ads that were no-bid on your site. And it does this per day. Chitika also provides ‘coaching’ on ways to improve your ad viewing percentage, that’s not the correct term but is descriptive. For instance, it will say something to the effect that your ads are 40% viewable because you do not have enough in the main viewing areas…to correct this do such and such.

On the revenue front, like Adsense, it displays daily revenue statistics. Chitika goes a step further in displaying revenue out to the 1/10000^th of a $1 or to the 1/100^th of a cent. So, perhaps this is only cool to me, but I’d like to know if I made money, even if it’s 1/100^th of a penny. I’d like to know because that’s progress, very small progress but progress nonetheless. Adsense will show this level of activity as $0 earnings, which it technically is, but you don’t get a sense of the level of progress which is important when you are just starting out. In any case, I now have both running and am pleased with the look and quality of the ads on my sites. If you are interested in Chitika, please sign up here.