My neighbor has the greenest grass in our neighborhood. He purchases the most advanced lawn treatment available and cares for it like a child. Last summer he decided to plant some flowers and start a garden because, according to him, “you know, the soil underneath the grass bed is richer and healthier than ever”. He planted vegetable seeds and the prettiest flowers but, a couple of weeks after he noticed the flowers were not thriving and the garden wasn’t growing like he had hoped. He spent all his time on the lawn’s upkeep that he neglected the flowers, expecting them to thrive without any work or effort.

Unfortunately many of our publishers make this same mistake when “planting” ads on their website. You may have a great, well-maintained site with great content, but you didn’t take a few minutes to customize and blend them into your site layout correctly. As a result, you might not be seeing much revenue accumulate in your account; how could this all have been prevented?

Simple customization features are available in Chitika | Premium ads that could be the key to keeping your ads alive on your site. These tricks take only seconds and when you sit back to enjoy the revenue rolling into your Chitika reports, you will appreciate the time you took to do it. Here are a few simple customization tips for your ads to thrive on your pages:

Available customization options:

-TIP: Matching your site background color, site text colors and links will help your ads blend nicely with your content.
  • Target: when clicked, this line of code will make the Premium ad open in a new window or tab:
  • ch_target = “_blank”;
-TIP: Enabling this will keep your ad clickers from navigating away from your page.
  • Font options: these lines of code will change the font of the ad’s main link or the text of the ad, respectively:
  • ch_font_title = “Arial”; ch_font_text = “Arial”;
-TIP: Similar to matching the colors on your page to your ad, matching the text will make it blend even better.
  • Inserting an alternate ad campaign to show an alternate ad unit when the Premium ads do not display:
  • ch_alternate_ad_url = “INSERT URL HERE”;
-TIP: Since Premium will only show to US/Canada search engine traffic, displaying an alt URL can help make sure you keep a steady flow of ad revenue coming in.

All of these customization options can be edited right in your Premium Code Panel. Posted by: Karla Escolas, CRM/Marketing -Chitika, Inc.

To apply for Chitika ads, click here. If you already have a Chitika account, you can get your Chitika | Premium code by clicking here.

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