Designing your eMiniMalls

In a similar way to how positioning your ads can impact their performance - I’ve found that the design of ads can have a major impact upon the rate that people click on them and would advise considering blending your ads into the design of your site. I’ve found by using other ad systems that ads that blend tend to do better than ads that stand out.

Chitika does not give you as many options as Adsense in this regard yet (the main difference is an inability to change the background colour of your ads - I’m told that this will be changed shortly and more adaptable background design will be an added feature soon) - but there are three ways that they give you to adapt the look of your ads.

Borders - if you have a site with a white background I would highly recommend that you make the borders of your ads white also. This gets rid of a visual barrier between your ads and your content. This is widely accepted as one of the most powerful strategies for Adsense optimisation and I suspect it works well with eMiniMalls also.

Title - the title of an eMiniMall ad is also a live link and therefore I would recommend that you choose a color that is the same as that of the majority of the links on your site. In this way you blend your ad into your page and make it clear that it is indeed a link.

Text - this is the color of the description of the products in the ad. Once again I’d recommend choosing a color that is similar to other text on your site. Some Adsense ‘experts’ also recommend making text in ads a slightly lighter color than the text on the rest of your site so as to allow the ‘title’ to stand out more. It’s worth experimenting with this and seeing how it looks on your site.