I should preface by saying I ran Chitika on a site of mine purely for my own assessment purposes, so I can't really offer too much by way of numbers, only my opinion. Firstly, Chitika no longer runs on the website. I removed it today. I made more from Google Search (alone), which is what I replaced in order to test it out. I left Adsense still running on the site. I spent a little time initially targeting the type of product offered via Chitika for the type of site (health) but didn't fine tune or analyse for the purposes of better targeting once I had it running. About the only numbers I can offer: Chitika Page Impressions: ~14,000+ Earnings: ~$3.00 Overall, the site traffic remained the same (little effect from google update). I am unable to let you know how long the test period lasted since it may breach Google's TOS. More ominously, I noted a considerable drop in Adsense earnings over the period -- around 50%. This may have been due to the site's users being wary about the new ads or it could have been due to some other factors I can only guess at although CTR, generally speaking, was only down a little. My conclusion, at least for this particular site, is that Chitika does not produce sufficient earnings to warrant a place. I was particularly disappointed to find that Chitika could not even match Google Search in earning power, let alone Adsense.
Was this on a UK site? Maybe your visitors were not interested in the ads because prices were all in US Dollars?
Wow those numbers suck. My experience has been significantly better than that ratio. In my opinion chitika is fairly situational... If I look at a page and think wow someone here would definately be interested in x product, then I will try it out. If there is a loose or unsure connection I have had much less success.
About one quarter of visitors are UK or Europe based. The traffic is predominantly US. The ratio is about one third worldwide and two-thirds US. That was pretty much the opinion I formed about the program -- that it would work well given the right type of website. When people are reading a health-related website they are seeking information, not products, ergo, crappy earnings. A site which had a different user group would probably fare much better, imho.
The gist of Chitika is products. If you have products to talk about, you can sell the clicks. Mesothelioma sites and other completely useless made for adsense "search" sites will do absolutely nothing with Chitika.
If the site I tried Chitika out on was made for Adsense then I am psychic since it was built way before Adsense was ever whispered about. I was one of the early publishers when it did come along.
Just to follow up on the information above ... Having removed Chitika entirely the other day, my Adsense earnings have today bounced back to their pre-Chitika levels. They were down about 50% during the period I tested the eminimalls. Google Search is also back to work, earning more by itself than Chitika.
I don't think it would sell well either Not a lot of broadband related things...besides like routers, etc, but then again people aren't really going on to your site looking for that.