Chitika have been rolling out some interesting offerings to publishers lately. Their eMinimalls are over a year old now, they’ve exctended them to Multi Product Unit minimalls and more recently announced Shoplinc shops and their Forums.
Another product that they’ve been testing lately with a small group of testers is ‘Related Product Units’ (RPUs).
I’ve been one of the testers on these units and they’ve been responsible for a good increase in my Chitika earnings over the past week or two.
The RPU units are perhaps the most simple and easy to integrate ads that Chitika offers – they simply list three related products to the post you’ve written. Here’s how they look:
This screen cap of the RPU ads came from my recent review of the Fujifilm Finepix F30 (my new favorite point and shoot camera).
A click on the link brings in the revenue (CPC) and readers are taken directly to the advertisers page.
The code behind these ads is very similar to Chitika’s other ads.
As the ads are still in testing the code generation process is not really automated – you need to get the code from Chitika via email but I’m told they are generating an automated system that will spit out customized code as you need it.
How do they perform? At a glance – very very well. They integrate nicely into a site and as a result CTR is good. The cost per click amount is 50-70% lower than eMiniMall ads for some reason so that’s a downer and they do cannibalize from other ads on your page a little – but for the increase in income that they’ve brought in has outweighed the decrease in other ads on the page.
At this point RPU ads are still being tested but as I’ve seen them mentioned in their Support area and in their forums I thought I’d mention them as they seem to be going public about them.
Once again (and as with all Chitika ad units) these will work best on product related sites.
The only thing that I’d suggest that Chitika do with RPUs is consider some sort of note on them that they are ads like Google’s ‘ads by Gooooogle’ as they can look so integrated into sites that it’s not obvious what they are. This might decrease performance but it comes close to blurring the line between content and advertising.
