Chitika

Chitika, Inc. is a search-targeted advertising company. It is located in Westborough, Massachusetts, USA. The name Chitika means "in a snap" in Telugu language.Chitika is a search-targeted advertising network that mainly works around a pay per click system. They are one of the biggest and most popular ad serving networks out there, and have even had big names in blogging like Darren Rowse promoting their service.

How's Chitika Works???

That's what you, as a publisher, would want for your website. To fully utilize the potential of page views or page impressions you get, and make money out of it. So how exactly does Chitika turn page views into profits? How different is it from Google Adsense or any other affiliate ad program?

Chitika focuses only on Search-targeted Advertising. Search-targeted advertising is another concept of affiliate advertising which uses the method of displaying ads targeted to a search query by a user on a major search engine like Google. 

Google Adsense on the other hand uses Contextual Advertising, meaning the advertisements displayed in an ad slot will try as much as possible to match the content on the webpage.

There are 4 kinds of Chitika Ads - Chitika Premium, Linx, WhitespaceAds and eMiniMalls. I'll be focusing only on Chitika Premium, as it is the best performing ad type and is most widely used. 

Here's an explanation on how Chitika's search-targeted advertising works (using Chitika | Premium).

1. User A goes to Google.com to look for generators and enters the keywords "powered generators".
( Chitika Publisher)

3. User A gets directed to www.poweredgenerators.com and the Chitika Premium ad slot will display advertisements relevant to the searched keywords - "powered generators". You can see the keywords highlighted in yellow below stating "You searched for powered generators". 

This is the simple technique that Chitika uses to capture the keywords leading to a web page and then use it to display targeted advertisements in the ad units.

» Sign Up as a Publisher

So now that you've understood how Chitika works, it's time to use it. If you haven't already registered as a Publisher, you may do so here: Sign Up as a Chitika Publisher.

Once registered, Login as a Publisher and you can begin creating your Chitika Premium Ad Unit. If you are familiar with Google Adsense's Ad Setup process, creating your first ad unit will be a breeze as Chitika adopts a similar user interface and ad setup process as Google Adsense.

1. Click the Ad Setup tab at the top navigation bar.

2. You'll now be at the Chitika Premium Ad Setup page. At the bottom of the page, there's a link "Other Chitika Ads" which will bring you to the ad setup of the other 3 ad unit types mentioned above. Chitika Premium is recommended above the other ad types.

3. Click the Get Code button and you will go to the next step of choosing your ad unit size. 

4. Choose your preferred ad unit size and click Continue To Next Step.

5. Now you have to choose a Fallback. The purpose of a fallback is to cater for visitors who land at your website not from a search engine or in short, for non-search traffic. You can pick 1 out of the 3 choices offered. The recommended choice would be Collapse into nothing. This option is good because your regular visitors will not be bothered by the advertisements while transient visitors will have a well-targeted ad. Pick your fallback and proceed.

6. This final step, Customize your ad, is optional but I strongly recommend that you pick a colour theme that suits with your website so that the ad unit blends into the content and won't look annoying or too obvious. Also, it's always good to assign a channel to your ad unit. Channels are generally used for analytical purposes. With channeling, you can know which ad at which page of which website is getting the most number of clicks hence allowing for convenient optimization. Go on to the next step.

7. Now you'll be shown the source code of the ad you have just created. Simply copy and paste this anywhere within the body tags of your web page - <body> [chitika-code] </body>.

So that's it! You're a Chitika Publisher master now. ;-) I hope I have helped you understand Chitika in one way or another. Feel free to ask me any questions if you encounter any issues.