“Rose” - Photo author: distinguish

Google Adsense is the top cpc ad source for the blogosphere. The success of Adsense is owed largely to the fact that they are huge and they can supply content-related ads on almost any topic. they also have a wide variety of ad formats, which means you can stick one almost anywhere you can find a bit of white space.

But Adsense ads are so common that no matter how well integrated into the content, most visitors have developed at least some degree of ad blindness to them. They know the ads are there and they don’t bother to check them out, let alone click through.

Enter Chitika

I first found out about Chitika right after they launched their service. I was browsing a webmaster forum and I ran across a thread announcing it. I remember, I was psyched and in spite of some early problems they had I kept using them.

So what makes Chitika better, you might ask? Well…

1. You can pick out exactly what ads you want to display

Rather than selecting ads based on your content (you can still use that as well), Chitika lets you choose the keywords based on which ads will be selected. This is true with most of their ad units, but what’s really extraordinary, with some units you can select particular products you want ads for. More on this later.

2. Chitika has ads which integrate nicely into your blog

Adsense has blocks of links and text which, granted, come in a great variety of sizes and can be customized as you please, but which still look like ads. Then there are image ads that are little more than banners with “Ads by Gooooogle” written under them and link blocks (which I totally hate and cant get to convert no matter what).

Unlike Adsense, Chitika has launched a lot of ad formats that are specifically tailored for blogs:

1. Chitika ShopCloud$, which are similar in look and feel to the tag clouds found on many blogs. You can specify all the aspects, from the exact words that appear in the cloud to color, size distribution (smallest and largest tag sizes) to how many tags you want to show.
2. Chitika RPU (or Related Products Unit) is great for putting at the bottom of your post on the post page (especially if you run a review blog). Based on keywords you specify or on a category you can choose when you generate the ad code it selects and displays links to related products. Again, you can customize everything, including the font of the text used. And the best thing about this is, again, that they don’t look like ads. At the bottom of this post I’ll include a preview for you to see exactly how this fits in.
3. Chitika Owna - I just love this thing. It’s the only ad on RollingMarbles.com at this moment. You can see it at the top of the middle column on all pages. It is a non-standard ad unit because you can select one product to display and can write your own short text about it. It was initially intended for display on social networking profile pages (MySpace, Facebook etc.), but with a bit of adaptation it can also be used on blogs. At the moment it only comes in one size, 250×250px and only a few styles to choose from, but I made my own in Photoshop and set it as background instead of the original one. I actually asked Chitika support if I’m allowed to do this and their reply was:

Yes, you can absolutely do that; as long as you do NOT remove the “Chitika | Owna” link on the unit, you may change it any way you like.

Best Regards,
Daniel
Chitika Customer Service

which is pretty cool of them.
These are just a few ad formats I was extremely impressed with. There are other more common formats, like eMiniMalls or Linx (keyword based links inserted into your content; you can find this on other ad networks as well, but Chitika has no minimum requirements for this format).

Bottom line is, with these formats you can serve top notch ads (which don’t look like ads) and potentially earn higher income than with Adsense. Chitika is a CPC network so what they click is what you earn.

As I said earlier, here is an example of the RPU unit in action: