Chitika November Bonus, Lower CTR as Product Links Gone

If you use Chitika Eminimalls on your website to make extra money, you might now notice a sliding CTR as they have removed the product links such that the active links now point to the advertisers directly.

Quoting the changes from the Chitika Blog

“To help filter out so-called “curiosity clicks” that typically do not lead to conversions on the merchants’ side, we updated the eMiniMalls units to drive qualified clicks. Hence, eMiniMalls users will notice a dip in the overall click through rate (and hence the overall revenue).

While we do strongly believe that in the long run everyone will benefit from our efforts to optimize this eMiniMalls (beta) service, we do recognize that in the short term this might lead to potential drops in revenue for some of our publishers. To best compensate for any potential revenue loss, we are issuing a network-wide 10% bonus through the end of November.”

But the upside is that they have compensated with a good 10% bonus (for November only) to make you some extra money which you might lose due to these changes. Now you need to relook at the sample ad units and track them with channels again to see which give highest CTR!

Update: Read more about Curosity Clicks, updated units and their steps to support the falling CTR.