Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Chitika — No More Malls, Lots More Money

Kontera, Infolinks and Vibrant Media’s Intellitxt all fit so neatly into your site
you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.

You will notice the difference in your revenues though.
Chitika’s ads are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a
bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eyecatching
and attractive.
They’ve gone through a few incarnations over the last few years. The original
eMiniMalls, with their pictures and tabs, were a great start. But they weren’t
perfect. On pages that didn’t talk about products, the units were largely
ignored. I tended only to use them on product pages.
And it turns out that advertisers weren’t completely happy with them either.
Even though they were generating plenty of clicks, those clicks weren’t
producing large numbers of sales. So the advertisers told Chitika that they
wanted more. They told Chitika that they didn’t just want clickthroughs of at
least 2 percent; they wanted conversion rates of at least 2 percent.
That’s some tall order. Chitika has no control over what users do once
they’ve clicked the ad. It’s not the ad system’s job to persuade users to buy.
That’s the seller’s job. All a good ad system can do is serve ads that match
users’ needs and make the units look appealing.
Chitika’s eMiniMalls were doing that very well.
But faced with the loss of advertisers unhappy at paying for leads that didn’t
convert, Chitika was forced to do a little re-thinking.



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