So I have long been very interested in Chitika, the website ad service that only shows for search traffic and not your usual viewers. You can read my earlier review here. I’ve been playing with/reviewing a few different Google ad alternatives on this blog and this was one of the ones I had a lot of hope for. After all, who wouldn’t want to show ads only to search traffic but let your regular readers check out the site with no advertising? It sounds like really good stuff and I love the idea.

But they changed their policies recently opting all existing ads into their premium service (which shows for non-search traffic as well as search traffic) which annoyed me but turned out to be a moot point since they didn’t approve any of my sites for premium anyway. Sure, if you sign up today you get to pick whether you want to advertise to search traffic only or not but as an existing user, that move really irked me. Why not let me opt in instead of forcing me to opt out?

But I had put a few little Chitika ads here and there to try them out on this site and they weren’t performing very well but I was fine with that as I was just testing them out. They were an experiment more than anything. I also found their customer service to be very good. I asked a question about them once on Twitter and not only got a reply right away but was welcomed into a beta program to try out some new stuff. They seemed like a good company to work with.

Then they went ahead and ticked me off. Here is a screenshot of my website before I removed all Chitika ads.

If you click on it, it’ll open larger in a new window so you can see it better.

Firstly, on the top left of this screenshot, you’ll see some Chitika ads. They are hilariously irrelevant to anything on the site as they are for finding an apartment and a London Broil Sandwich both of which have unrelated photos next to their links. But let’s talk about the banner ads on the right hand side. The one with the orange shirted lady is from Google, nothing wrong there. The one next to it, that disastrous mess of random links is from Chitika. It says Chitika AdCloud underneath it.

The problem? Well there is already an ad there from a competing service I’ve been trying out called Adbrite. Chitika took it upon itself to just completely cover up and obscure the Adbrite ad, Bogart-ing the space entirely. This is Not Cool with capitals N and C. Especially since I get better results with Adbrite than I have ever gotten with Chitika. Their action could have cost me my Adbrite account as covering up ads is against their Terms of Service. (It literally covered up the Adbrite ad, the “Your Ad Here” on the bottom is part of the Adbrite banner.)

I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt so I checked my Adbrite account, maybe I had set Chitika ads to display in some cases. But no, I hadn’t. The funny thing is that all those keywords are the top keywords that bring people to my site so I guess their logic is in the right place, though they’d have to work pretty hard to create an uglier, less appealing ad.

But just covering my other advertising with ads for your service is unacceptable. I went ahead and stripped all the Chitika ads from this site. I’m leaving them up on a few of my other websites for now until I have a chance to get to the bottom of this but I’d love to hear from Chitika about whether this was just some horrible glitch or whether they actually thought this was a good idea.

But the ad on the side went back to being good ole Adbrite as soon as I removed the Chitika ads so no harm done there.

I would love to say that this is a for-profit blog but I don’t make more than a few pennies a month on this site. That is mostly fine by me. I didn’t start a blog to make money, I started it because I have things to say and I wanted somewhere to say them. But if I am going to be throwing content out into the wilds of the web, I sure wouldn’t mind if it made some money so I have been playing with a lot of different advertising options lately.

I have already written about my experiences with Project Wonderful and QuickAds. My best performing ads are Google Adsense but you are limited to 3 of those per site and I already meet that limit so I wanted to try some of the Adsense alternatives out there. One of the sites that got the most good press during my search was Chitika so I have been trying it out.

What’s to like about Chitika?

• Can be used in conjunction with Google Adsense or right alongside of it
• Doesn’t show up for your regular readers (<– My favorite)
• Ability to sell the adspace for your own price

Chitika is very unique in that it only shows to people who reach your site via a search engine. If someone reaches your site from any direct link (their RSS reader, bookmark, a link you send out on Twitter, etc) then they don’t see the ads at all. I really love this feature. This way my regular readers and Twitter followers aren’t seeing this ad spot at all but the people who just chanced upon my blog are seeing targeted search results based on whatever they searched for that led them to my site in the first place. It’s based on the idea that casual surfers who chanced on your site through search results are the most likely to click on ads anyway so why not only show it to them? It is also like a perk for regular readers that their experience has less ads.

Want to see this in action (or not see it, as the case my be)? There is a Chitika ad right at the top of this post. If you came here through search results, you are seeing it but, if you are a regular reader or otherwise accessed this from another direct link, you aren’t seeing it. I think that is pretty cool!

There are a wide variety of options for the Chikita Premium ad boxes and many sizes so you should be able to fit one just about anywhere.

Their other service is called Chitika AdPro. This service is much more limited in the sizes that you can use but has its own merits. Once you set up one of these boxes, you can set a minimum ad price on it. To will show the normal Chitika search result based ads until you get as advertiser who is willing to meet the price that you set. Then that advertiser can take over that space and show their ads. When you have no buyers, you are still getting a chance to make money off of that space but, as long as someone is willing to pay, it also gives you the option to sell it for more to a specific buyer.

While I have only had one Chitika box set up for about a week, I have been pleased so far with their results. As always, I will post updates on how it is going, especially if I later change my mind and decide I no longer like their service. But, as blog ad options go, this one came very highly recommended and, so far, I really like what they have to offer so I am very optimistic.

If you do decide to try Chitika, I would appreciate it if you signed up through the banner below. Regular readers know I write about everything I try out either way but this service has a referral program so, if you are were going to try it out anyway, I’d appreciate the referral.