Chitika have updated their blog with some interesting tidbits:
– they’ll be releasing referrer buttons shortly
– they’ve pointed to a page that has a range of the types of products that they have stocks of ads for here
Also on Chitika eminimalls news – Alex has been writing some interesting Chitika eMiniMalls tips on his unofficial Chitika site. Two of the interesting ones are:
– Chitika Daily Keyword Rotation – this javascript code rotates different Chitika eMiniMalls keywords on different days of the week
– Chitika Keywords from Visitors’ Searches – this one will serve ads depending upon what people have come to your blog searching for. ie if they arrived on your blog after searching Google for ‘MP3 players’ you should get served ads for MP3 players.
I’ve not tried either of these tips – but they look useful.
What happens if the visitor enters through a referrer that chitika has no ads for ? Is it reverting to the default ones specified before or displaying just one random ad ?
you’re asking the wrong person :-) Go talk to Alex :-)
Martin –
The referrer button is going to be just a graphic that has a link to their “Apply Now” button with a referrer querystring equal to your username there. An example of that link would be –
https://chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=hagrin
Even if the referrer has no ads setup for it, it won’t matter – this isn’t an ad based button – just a static link giving you 10% of whatever the person who uses your code makes.
damn I discovered this 2 weeks ago now the cats out of the bag!
Hey thanks for the post, Darren.
If the query is not recognized or the URL isn’t formed as expected, Chitika will indeed revert to the default ads.
Sorry for the double post; I misunderstood the question at first.
If the user comes to your page with a query that is not served by Chitika, say “loan refinancing” it will not revert to your pre-specified query. It will simply display the default Chitika ads that they show when the system does not recognize what you feed it. There is no way to have it revert to your previously specified query since I can’t tell if the keywords will be recognized without sending it through.
Ok – in that case it can’t be used with Adsense as it will revert to a contextual setting.
I think it might be argued that using this hack, whether or not it is successful on any given pageload, represents a “contextually served advertisement.” It is serving an ad based on page content… so this would be for Chitika only pages. *
I’ve toyed with the code and I don’t see any way around it at the moment. It would work if we could set a default term for the page or site that would appear if the query did not return results.
* Note added on my page reflecting this.
I kinda’ wonder about that Darren…once in a while I notice that when I load a page, for some reason one of my Chitika Ads isn’t picking up my query…however, with Contextual set to off, I’ve never noticed any of these un-queried ads to look like they have anything to do with my site. They look more like they are default ads being served up because my query didn’t work, and the “Contextual” seting was set to off.
Maybe we should ask Chitika…
C’mon you guys can figure this one out, you’ve seen the answer here on this very blog before, put on those thinking caps …
I have been very satisfied with Chitika since adding it to my site from day 1. Now with all these great tips on how to configure Chitika for your site just makes it even better.
I bet a few people at Google Adsense are sweating a bit.
After the code they supply, can’t you add in a few keywords (that you current run) after it splits the referrer string so you’re guaranteed to get something even if the search keywords don’t yield something so it doesn’t become contexual.
For example of what I mean above (comment 10):
After this code:
else if (dr.match(“google”) || dr.match(“msn”))
{
var userQuery = getVariable(“q”);
}
Add this:
else{
var userQuery = “”;
}
userQuery += ” electronics ipod”;
The else covers the other search engines (non yahoo, msn, google) and then use “userQuery +=” to add more keywords.
Would that work and be Google Adsense TOS compliant?
I was not happy with Chitika on my blog. I guess they just don’t work well for pets. I did not have a single person click on the ads while I had them up. I did a lot better with adsense. And I noticed that my pages loaded a lot slower when I had the Chitika ads there. So I gave up on them for now. Maybe I will try them again when I have a different kind of blog to try them on.
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