We break out from our regular traveling posts (one to come shortly) and give you an interview with one person that a lot of money making bloggers should now: Ryan Travis, Senior Account Manager at Chitika. The interview was a joint work of me and my cousin, so if you don’t like something, take it on him:
1. Ryan, first of all, what is Chitika?
Founded in 2003, Chitika is a full service online advertising network specializing in the blogospshere and the social web. Today, it engages buyers, brands and bloggers by serving interactive, user-controllable ads directly within relevant posts. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue. For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting online consumers and qualified buyers – as they are actively considering a purchase – and engaging them in relevant, brand-specific or product-specific conversations. Chitika now serves more than 1.5 billion ads per month and counting.
2. And who is Ryan Travis? People have nothing but good opinions about you, why is that? :)
That is because of my amazing dance moves :) – heh – but seriously, I’m sure there are some “not-so-good” opinions out there as well. From my end, I am 100% committed that all of our users have a fantastic experience with our company, so I try to go the extra mile to ensure that this happens.
3. How is the click value calculated? Why is it lower in the last week (last week of January)?
Click values vary from advertiser to advertiser. Since we have thousands of merchants offering millions of different products, you will always see variations in the CPC’s. For January specifically, we saw an expected seasonal dip here. Every year after the busy holiday shopping season, our advertisers “pull back” on their spending, and we traditionally see lower CPC’s during this time of year. On our end, we are aggressively working on some cool deals to combat this – for example, take a look at our brand new CPM units.
4. What is Chitika’s audit? Why does it differ so much (from 10% up to 50-60%)?
The audits are done to discount illegitimate clicks (from spam clicks, robots, accidental clicks, etc.). I have no idea what the metrics are to calculate this, but it happens on our end and then again on our advertisers’ ends. It shouldn’t vary too much, but again – if some bots spam your page on a certain month, then you will see a much larger audit.
5. Which ad units are the best money earners (eMiniMalls, Linx, RPU and so on..), in your experience and overall blogs in the network?
That’s a great question – and actually there is no single answer here – it really depends on the site! One thing I will say is that I am completely surprised at how well Linx is actually performing across the network – it is definitely a very strong product for us.
6. Do you have any tips for bloggers on how to increase their earnings with Chitika?
Experiment with different placements and ad-types (eMiniMalls, RPU, Linx, etc.) – and pay attention to your reports!!! It is very hard to tell what is working and what is not if you do not spend some time looking at your reports. The best practice here is to create separate channels for each ad-unit that you are experimenting with – this way you can see exactly how that specific ad is performing. Here’s the best part – we just released a brand new reporting system – take it for a spin! ;)
7. Do you have ads that are geo-targeted? (not appearing in Romania, for example)
Well all of our ads are actually geo-targeted. For example – if a user from Germany comes to your site, they will see ads from German merchants appearing in your Chitika ads. This goes for any of the countries that we accept clicks from (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK, US).
