Jacob Nielsen has a new article on reducing bounce rates on websites. I have a lot of clicks into what Nielsen calls a deep web page, and then the user is gone. I’d like for surfers to hang around and try a few more pages. I will try to follow some of his recommendations.
While I am on the subject of traffic, I have been following a discussion of Chitika premium ads. Chitika is sort of like AdSense, except their ads are not as smart in some ways. They show ads that will get clicks, no matter what the content on your page. The trade off is that an AdSense ad shows ads targeted to the people interested in your page content. Chitika ads are targeted to a more general reader and they pay better. You can have both types of ads, but it does clutter your page.
The new Chitika premium ads are only shown to users who have hit your site through a search engine. Your normal users will see no ad. Chitika says that most normal surfers ignore ads, but that users using search engines are much more likely to click an ad. The ads are geared towards the keyword search from the search engine and not the content on the page. This is pretty slick. I put the ads on one website and I tripled the Chitika revenue, but it is still not as good as AdSense. The Chitika ads still look too much like ads and people don’t like to click ads.
Since the new ads are like affiliate links and don’t pay per click, it may be a while before I see the real revenue from these ads. I’ll keep you posted.