Chitika eMiniMall publishers – Do you want the good news or the bad news first?
The Bad News
Chitika have just announced on their blog a few minutes ago that today they’ve had to make a few changes to their eMiniMalls system in response to working with their advertisers.
It must be a fine balancing act looking after the needs of advertisers and ensuring that they’ve got good conversion rates and responding to the needs of publishers who want good click through rates.
It looks like things might have been tipped a little in favor of the publishers because they’ve just announced that some of the text previously on Chitika eMiniMalls as a live link to advertisers (and therefore a paying link) will be made into static text. This is to combat the curiosity clicking that some advertisers are getting which don’t convert to sales.
The upside of this is that advertisers should see an upswing in their conversions – the downside is that publishers will no doubt see a downturn in their CTR.
The Good News
On the upside of the equation Chitika have announced a two week bonus for publishers. Starting today they will be giving publishers a 10% bonus on top of their normal earnings until the end of November to help compensate for the changes.
This means that while CTR will decrease that the already generous click values (update: this is my experience in my niches where click values are pretty good – I’ve been reminded in comments below that in some niches this is not the case – point taken) will increase for the next 2 weeks – especially timely at this time of year which is usually a good time for publishers of ad systems like Chitika and Adsense.
Other good news is the announcement of coming features in the coming weeks:
1. An option to set alternate urls – this means those of us with a readers from non supported countries (clicks from many Asian countries are not accepted) can set things so that when someone from a country not supported by Chitika reads your blog they don’t even see the Chitika ads but instead could get an ad served that has more chance of conversion.
2. Geo targeting: Visitors from UK will see matching deals from UK merchants – this should lead to better conversions for advertisers and publishers alike. There’s nothing like seeing a pound sign instead of a dollar sign next to a price if you’re a UK reader.
Balancing Act
As a publisher I’m a bit disappointed in the news of an impending decrease in CTR – I’m hoping it won’t be too much. But on the flip side (my wife calls me the eternal optimist) keeping advertisers happy is a key ingredient in any advertising system – without them we earn nothing so hopefully this will not only retain current advertisers in the system but attract new ones in which in turn should increase the bidding price for ads and increase the long term profitability of participating in the program for publishers.
