I'm seeing some weird stuff for 180x150 and 160x160 ads. You can't click on the product description any more, instead there is a little text with a price and the reseller that the user must hit. I track clicks with 3th. party software and clicks have nearly dissapeared since this started.
they probably did this to minimize curiosity clicks. It's probably a good thing because it protects the advertisers. Otherwise advertisers run away and we won't be enjoying the high CPCs that chitika gives us.
I had noticed this a few hours ago on a 486 one when did you notice this? Today? One could also click the store logo and text link the product is from on the best deals page
izahan, you are probably right about the curiosity clicks. I think Chitika is taking steps to protect its merchants. I am starting to see eminimalls on sites not as good as mine and that makes me wonder. I am sure steps like this are going to hit my revenue big time. However, I look at Chitika as incremental revenue from what I make from Adsense. So I'd rather let these guys experiment and come up with a sustainable long term program (No -- I am not in it for the quick hit). Its a beta program after all, so my expectations are limited. My advice to everyone is to take a long hard look at your targeting. Chitika gives us publishers a lot of flexibility to get the targeting right. So if you are still running with the standard ipods, you might want to look into the targeting. I am able to do about $8 eCPM because I target the eminimalls to the title of my blog posts and position them correctly.
Yes this is gona hit everyone's CTR big time. I hope they change it back to old format. It's ridiculous that I serve such a large ad with only so little of it being clickable.
This will probably lower the CTR for Chitika ads on my site big time. I will have to do a bit more optimizing of the placement and colours now. Only time will tell though.
I just checked out their example ad on their mainpage. How do I change my ads that they show the 'Best Deals' tab as first too?
Wow I didn't notice that.. I imagine the conversion rate on those clicks were probably extremely low. It does hurt though as there is a lot less real estate to click on for more info. Read More and on the link the description itself. I had changed my links to default to description recently, but I am changing them back now.. makes no sense to have the description first if they can't even click on it.
While this is probably going to sting a little with lower CTR I think it is probably in our best interests as publishers to grin and bear it as they're obviously doing it to help with advertiser relations. If they lose the advertisers due to the 'curiosity clicks' that izahan mentions then we all lose big time.
I hope they would change it back too. I was doing quite well with the clickable title. If my ctr and revenue goes down I'd have to look for another ppc affiliate program.
They must have their reason doing this. My thought is that they found too much curiosity clicks and want to protect the advertisers more.
Nearly 5000 pageviews so far this morning and 1 click. I am going to wait out the day, and if nothing dramatic happens I'm back to adsense.
Hmm.. now my titles became clickable again. Not.. apparently in my firefox under Linux, titles are clickable - in Windows they are not - must be some caching thing. Sheez.. I where happy for a minute there.
Ok.. I'm beginning to think they changed something so the tracker can't see the click anymore. I've not had one single click more and I can't belive it can be that bad even with the new stuff. I just wish the stats where here soon so I could calm down
Not all the ad formats were changed by the way... in the 120x600 and 468x60 the title is still clickable for example. Seems only the big formats were changed.
Hmm... Looking at the eMinimalls formats, I can see all formats had been changed, small and big ones. I'm going to sleep now. I hope when I wake up I'll find out this is just a bad dream and everything is back to normal again.
This is stupid. Now people will get like 1 click a day and no money which means less advertisers which means less publishers.
So what is the status? I normally block ads from my view unless I am working on something as I go across many of my sites and I don't want to influence impressions on the lower traffic sites. So are the ads back to as they were before? I can speak that as of yesterday the description was not clickable on the 468-60 banner. I just realized I didn't understand the actual problem.. Shows you how observant I am.. Regardless, it is still the same.. nothing has been changed back. I was thinking description page, not description on product page, but I got it straight now.