Chitika crash

earnings, down, down, down

[Andkon]

The unaudited stats for 11/17 are almost one-third of 11/15. Other horror stories, anyone else?

[digicamhelp]

I'm losing AdSense money since I began using Chitika, not to mention a huge amount of time. What's the saying, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

How impressive are these past weeks stats?

Date CTR

2005-11-16 0.29%
2005-11-15 0.54%
2005-11-14 0.60%
2005-11-13 0.82%
2005-11-12 0.86%
2005-11-11 0.87%
2005-11-10 0.84%

Most of their ads will be coming down from my site real soon. Perhaps I'll play again when the season is over...this time of year typically generates the most revenue for a site like mine. I can not afford to be in the beta game.

Lesson learned!

[Andkon]

CTR has decreased for me too, but not as dramatically. I won't be ditching Chitika though, but perhaps seeing how Adsense is paying out now. At least that money's guaranteed in the sense that there's of no mystery audit off in the distant future.

I'm also irked a tad at the product title keeping the link colors. This doesn't matter for most sites that have the black-on-white/blue-link design, but for sites more "colorful" I wonder by how much the misleading color scheme is driving down clicks. For example, my site's links don't even have underlines so the non-linked product text looks exactly as a normal link does. Ouch,` ouch, ouch.

[sailorjwd]

I don't really understand why they limited the click area. Do they think people were accidenty clicking on the link part? I think they reduced the clickable parts too much..

The big blue title matchs the links on my site so I think they are clicking the title and assuming it just doesn't work. The clickable part of the title is squeezed and almost hidden by the Search tab on my 160x160 ads. I want the title black and the link blue underlined.

I made 20% of normal income yesterday - not worth the time required to set the damn ads up.

A half-way decent revenue stream turned to cr*p overnight.

[newguy1]

I agree that the small clickable area is irritating but my CTR is actually back to an average level after a huge drop then spike. I've only been running Chitika a month so I don't have any long term stats to know what is normal for my site.

MY TREND
2 weeks ago CTR <1%
1 week ago CTR ~X0-Y0%
Yesterday CTR ~A-B%

PPC is as high as ever, which is 10-20x what my industry was for Adsense so I can't really complain.

[digicamhelp]

Forgive me ignorance, but what do these letter percentages stand for? Thanks!

1 week ago CTR ~X0-Y0%
Yesterday CTR ~A-B%

[Zygoot]

I can't believe this. One month ago I was roughly making 2.5 to 3 times as much with Chitika as now :-(

[NoLimits]

Yes. Game Over -

The thing that is really crappy is that the number of clicks I'm sending them is unchanged - the number of clicks they count has however.

No free visitors - sorry.

[photo200]

2 NoLimits

How do You know how much clicks You are sending to them?
May be it is just CTR ratio which falls after they made image and the title non-clickable?

[NoLimits]

I have not modified the chitika code, but I have found a way to track clicks on their ads via a sql database and php.

[skunker]

Just took mine off.

[Freeboi]

My success story in Chitika has turned into a horror story today. My earnings went down by as much as 75%. If this continues, then there's nothing special with Chitika anymore. It can't compete with Adsense or YPN. Too bad I had high hopes for chitika. I hope it'd stop shooting itself in the foot.

[MarkWolk]

It seems quite obvious that Chitika has been forced to do the changes, as their advertisers must have complained about high clickthrough costs and small returns. Don't panic; at the end of the day, it's in everyone's interest to fine-tune this innovative product.

[Andkon]

Agreed, it's also in beta. Although it was nice to such great payouts on some days :-)

[digicamhelp]

>> at the end of the day, it's in everyone's interest to fine-tune this innovative product.

I agree. I like the concept and hope it succeeds. Saying that, I'm not going to overly participate in a beta program during, for me, the most lucrative time of the year.

I'm sticking with them but, for now, I'm in the process of reducing their presence on my site real estate by about 50-60%. Thankfully, AdSense is back to looking a lot better.

I'll give more thought to Chitika after the holidays and hope they have things better ironed out by then.

[Zygoot]

I'm going to give it two more days. I'm trying a couple of optimizations and if those don't work I'll switch some of my ad inventory back to AdSense and others.

[digicamhelp]

I did better today, with significantly less ads than I had the day before.

2005-11-17 0.62%

2005-11-16 0.29%

My observation thus far, since Chitika began filtering out “curiosity clicks,” is that less of their ads do better. I think overdoing them causes more ad blindness than Google ads.

I removed a number of Chitika ads from my site, put back more Google ads and rearranged both to what I believe is a more complementary positioning. No humongous earnings jump but at least I'm back to making the per day income expected for this time of year.

[Celicaphile]

I'm seeing a 75%+ drop over the past two days as well. Buh bye Chitika... you screwed the pooch on this update!

[Andkon]

11/18: I see a rebound. I took Chitika off my pages just for a breather more than half-way through the day to see how Adsense is doing. At any rate, the Chitika CPM went up... it's about half what is used to be before the product links got the axe.

[MamaDawg]

I just took a look at the new ad format - noticed that on one of mine (468x60) the price actually overlays the title ...

"Best price on the In$179.99"

Ugh! - bye, bye Chitika!