Apr 9 2007
Chitika Reveals Digg Traffic CTR
By Jeremy Schoemaker
49 comments 
This is some cool stuff. Chitika has went through all there logs and revealed the click through ratio of digg users vs Google users. Obviously people coming from Google clicked on more Chitika Ads then Digg but I was still suprised the amount of digg users who click on Ads after all.
- 49 Comments. What say you?
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If you think abotu the data some more, let’s say that the ads are all at the end of blog posts (which they assume), you might be able to chalk it up to the types of users and how interested they are in the content. Diggers are piqued by the title and go to the page, if they don’t see much of interest then maybe they move on before they read the end. Google SERPs searchers are trying to find an answer and are more likely to read farther down to find their answer, which puts the ad in front of their eyes more often.
I wonder how the numbers would compare if the ads appeared at the top of a post.
Saweet study very intereting to see the CTR and comparisons.
Nice information. I think we all knew this was the case the digg traffic isn’t as good as SE traffic but now this gives more backing to our thoughts.
I’m wondering what other numbers Chitika might want to share…
How come that your picture with half mill is photoshoped i mean take a look of the HUMER you stand there with empty hands. Hope that was April 1st picture!
http://www.shoemoney.com/gallery/v/misc/AzoogleAds_Check.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1
hmm this was interesting indeed.
Heh Andre .. anything you have in mind ?
As long as it is aggregate analysis like this, I am all ears.
Read the blog some more you’ll find out all about the picture even the picture says it’s fake!!
yeah, it depends on what you consider to be “good”. Sure they dont click that many ads, but some of the diggers do subscribe for the RSS if they are interested in the content for instance. Not that a large percentage will grab the feed, but hey out of 10,000 visitors for a digg front page even a small percentage translates into a good rss boost.
Is this really that big of a surprise? All of the guys in our office that read Digg use FireFox with Ad blocking. It would be interesting if would filter for only IE users to eliminate popular ad blockers.
Andre said: I’m wondering what other numbers Chitika might want to share…
Any ideas ? As long as it is aggregate analysis like this, I am all ears.
jim said: I wonder how the numbers would compare if the ads appeared at the top of a post.
Honestly, I dont know. If you put the ads at the top of the post, then one might think that more people will see it and so the CTR will be higher.
However, on the flip side, most users dont want to be disturbed when they have come to read an article. So it makes sense to let them read their article and then hit them with related ads at the end of the blog post or article.
I think you have reached your limit of front page diggs shoemoney. Save some for the rest of us!
who really cares about digg? Honestly, i’ve never seen the point of adding digg widgets to any of my sites. Why? Because the traffic is worthless. The users are mostly geeks that could care less about ads. They are their to critique and waste time.
On the contray, digg is a good way to test your web and database servers.
I’ve personally made more money in 6 hrs worth of Digg traffic than I have in any one day doing PPC on Adcenter and Adwords combined.
Now that I think about it, that says somethings about my PPC skills. :/
Hey, Brent, see if Shoe will let you do a guest post on how to make money off of Digg traffic, so far all I have seen says to make sure it is something tech, but that advice is generic as hell.
Very interesting, I can believe it since Digg as more ad blockers on it for users than a google searcher
I suppose I could show what I did at one of the NPMMO meetings. Yes, it was tech related (and a very hot topic at the time ) and that is what did it, not really the technique.
I’d imagine Diggers have a smaller attention span then google readers, afterall when your using Digg your visiting lots of content that looks interesting over a wide variety of topics, with google traffic your looking for an answer so if the page looks legit you’ll probably read more of the content and see the ads..
As great as this test is we really need something more indepth to call it one way or another.
True.. Which is why so many of us still love Digg, its a game of numbers
Im not really suprised, studies are already showing banner blindness is increasing with regular users, surely power net savvy types are ahead of that bell curve.
I would like to see some heatmap data:
How long do people from Google look at the ads and how much time do Diggers spend with looking at ads.
It’s not surprising at all. One would think that people who use Digg are more technically savy than those coming from the Search Engines. It seems like more technically savvy people (especially webmasters) don’t click on ads nearly as often as non-techies.
Thanks for letting us know about the study. I don’t keep an eye on the Chitika blog, but probably should.
I am a user that people don’t want at their blog if their blog is geared at earning money online. I have played around with plug ins for firefox, and I don’t see any kontera, google, or any ads in that sense. Pages look as if you just started them with context in them. My goal is to get my seo ranking up higher in google so I can get more randoms everyday to visit my blog.
this would be great if my site technati didnt get crashed by the dam digg effect
I can vouch for the data. Just got dugg yesterday and from 44000 visitors from digg I had only 76 clicks! Yes, only 76 clicks on ads.
But the traffic and the fact that my site crashed was well worth the diggs coming in. Everything got mirrored on duggmirror so all my statistics were logged.
This is a very interesting study. Now I would like to see one done with Digg users compared to MySpace users.
If you not sure, just look at the reflection in the car next to him :8)
If your chtika ads are on tech or product sites you could do very well with this company. Otherwise I haven’t seen one instance of it being a benefitual monetization alternative.
Interesting, but not terribly surprising.
I don’t think it would be a Firefox / IE issue.
I reckon it’s more likely (as Jay says) a “banner blindness” issue - that more computer savvy people don’t click on ads.
I was thinking about signing up for it, but I don’t talk anything about technology or products for that matter. So I now I don’t think I will.
makes perfect sense
I am not surprised at this statistics … Sometimes i wonder with digg users … Strange community.
people using google are actullay looking to buy stuff not digg
Not that surprising- Digg users are there to browse and read interesting articles, not to buy.
I think it is a firefox /ie issue. Computer Savvy people won’t even use IE in the first place. They’ll do Firefox , Flock or Opera .. IE is not even in the equation most of the time..
Digg is awesome for branding, burst marketing and link building, all of which will lead to long term profits. Low ad CTR shouldn’t be a concern at all.. good study but really redundant IMO.
no matter how much Digg traffic you get I think it’s junk traffic still.
I agree with the comment about Chitika being worthless outside a fairly narrow market. I threw them a ton of traffic pulling relevant ads and saw well under 1% CTR. I’m not saying that they don’t report honestly, cuz I have nothing to back it up. But it sure felt that way. I can certainly imagine a return that low on CPA…but CPC? Always struck me as suspicious. It also wasn’t explained early on that the first click didn’t count. Much like Adlinks, which perform much MUCH better, you had to click twice to get credit. Just not worth my time.
there was a good amount of talk about this at SES as well.
I really don’t see how this is suprising. If they could somehow compared Chitika to AdSense or YPN clicks, from Digg traffic vs. Google traffic then that would be really interesting.
Exactly. Digg users do not search, they read… there motive in coming to your site is to read something particular and leave, because they a whole bunch of other things to check.
Wondering why I could never get any diggs on my fashion site…got any advice for me shoemoney..every one else loves my blog fashion industry people…but what could I write about that doesn’t sacrifice my integrity as a teacher to the masses of my readers? I love what I do but it is so much more interesting when the masses know about it and critique it.
Id be really interested in specific numbers, but Ive always known the CTR on digg was very low. Its target market doesnt click ads plus a number of users have advertisements blocked.
After all major SE , Digg is very good way to traffic.
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