How to maximise commissions per click

What is the best way to ensure you are getting up high paying keywords? Any way to check? Do you go for what normally pays a lot on Adsense?

i.e. for my forum, should I put up a credit card advert instead of programming related stuff, which is the theme of the forum.

How can you work out what pays the most?

This must be critical information for most people.

Jon

 

I think putting generic credit card ads on a programming forum is likely to get you a significantly low click through rate. Remember these are not adsense ads, and as such, the clickthrough rate is lower to begin with... By Chitika's own admission they see 1% click-through with these ads compared to .5% with other banner ads. Make the ads competely off-topic and I think you are looking at very small click-through rates. Little if anything is known about payouts from various ads, so it would be wild speculation.

My personal strategy involves me going "shopping" for ads. I will go through shopping.com and amazon and look for related products and things which I think my customer might be interested in. Think of it as buying product for your own store. What do you think people who visit the site might be interested in? Then I add those available products to my lists.

Sure I might find someone who wants a vcr on my game site, but they are probably even going to be more likely to investigate ads for games and things related to games.

You can always ad a mix too.. for example one of my game sites has a lot of ads for computer hardware. Why? Because I know the game is hardware intensive and a lot of people will likely have to upgrade. So I pick out key elements like graphics cards and such and target those.

So while you don't have to tie yourself down to your subject, you should think about what your audience wants. Programmers, for example, are likely to be more technology and gadget orientated, so you can target some of those products as well. I don't think there is anything about programmers that makes them more interested in credit cards than anyone else, so I would view that as something not worth targetting. Plus I don't even think they have credit card ads, most of the ads are retail products.

Finally, chitika is not good, in my opinion, for all sites. Like I said, their inventory is almost all retail products, and that is not always the best use of space for all sites. So pick and choose where and how you use chitika in conjuction with your other revenue sources and you will likely be very happy.

 

i agree with aeiouy - great advice. experiment with a variety of products - look through shopping.com. and amazon and see what you can find. The more relevant the product the higher your CTR will be.

 

Chitika works great on my site http://www.usedmac.ca because of the fact that you can choose your own keywords for each individual ad. I currently have 5 ads running on the page and change the keyword up every couple of days to keep the ads fresh.

Works great for the type of site I guess. I have noticed about the same CTR as Google but the Chitika payout per click is much higher than Google.

 

I've done the same on my site illusionsetc.blogspot.com I looked through shopping.com and selected items relating to optical illusions. To mix it up I put another at the bottom with their default items.

I'll be glad when they start reporting the channels that they told us how to implement.

 

Anyone done a test to see how the defaults do compared with your own targetted list?

 

I changed the defaults right away because they did not have anything to do with the topic of my site. I would honestly work on using your own keywords, unless your sites topic is the same as the keywords supplied by Chitika.

 

If you want, use my code here: Chitika Keywords from Visitor's Searches which keys in the Chitika ad depending on what search referrer string your user gives. Can't get much more targeted than that.