I would simply like your opinion on my placement of adverts on these 2 sites and I you feel chitika has a place on these sites : www.-------.com and www. ------.co.uk

Thank you, J

Our Reply

Hi,

Thanks for your interest and for filling the form on our site.

1. As you are in a very competitive sector with high EPC it's worth chasing every click and ad placement has a direct relationship with CTR. But your site is nicely designed and has ads very well integrated into the design of the page. Some travel sites follow a design principle of having a lot of flashing stuff above the fold. As people instinctively shy away from what they perceive to be ads they end up clicking the text in the middle of the page which happens to be pure Adsense. I've seen sites with that design consistently do over 40% CTRs (over the last 18 months)... but it does look tacky.

2. Is Chitika right for you? Should you replace Adsense? Unfortunately, I don't believe Chitika is best suited to travel sites at the moment. Or, at least, it doesn't perform better than Adsense for travel sites.

3. However, that said, they may not have tickets/hotels/the other standard big money affiliate items in the travel sectors but they do have luggage, travel accessories etc (see examples) that get fairly good CTRs when placed at the bottom of the page. If someone hasn't found what he wants by the time he reaches the bottom of your page very few of them will click the link there to the forums - they'll likely want out. You can give them a handy way out by placing an ad above the footer. I wouldn't use an Adsense ad here for two reasons A) They've seen two of your Adsense ads and didn't bite, it's unlikely they'll bite now and 2) As this Adsense ad is the lowest in your html it'll attract the lowest paying ads.

4. Based on the above I'd have another look at your CSS. The adblock where people are less likely to click (your floating right column) is higher up in your html - as it would naturally be with CSS - but is getting more valuable ads than the ad block in the top-middle/most-prominent place on your page.

5. Though it's unlikely Google ever runs out of travel ads for your specific part of the UK it never hurts to have alternate ads in place. Some publishers use in-house banners, but a good implementation would use another contextual program - like Chitika - to serve paying ads instead of PSAs. As you may know you can simply create a page with the Chitika ads and post that URL into the Google Adsense code creation page. You can even make that Chitika ad contextual - you can turn Contextual on and off with Chitika - and still be within the Google TOS. Another good reason to have an alternate ad is that not all the advertisers on your page have their campaigns activated for all countries. Someone in Mongolia could be viewing your page and seeing PSAs because none of your advertisers think Mongolia is worth activating in the Adwords campaign.

Hope that helps.

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