Chitika eMiniMalls Early Review On ReveNews

Look up. We’re testing out Chitika’s eMiniMalls on ReveNews. What’s an eMiniMall? I’m glad you asked.

Chitika’s eMiniMalls bring life to product promotion on the web. Automatically targeted to the content of your webpage, eMiniMalls selects the best product and provides your users with robust comparative shopping information to make an informed buying decision – before they leave your site. As users click, you make money.

In real-time, eMiniMalls selects the top products for your web page and displays interactive and robust information such as product ratings, descriptions, reviews, related Blog content and even where users can get the best buy on the net. All of the information needed for comparison shopping – all in one place.

They’ve only been running on the site for about 12 hours or so, and Chitika only runs stats overnight, so I can’t tell you if they are generating revenue or not. But I can give you my first impressions before I see if they convert or not.

Design
I like them. Although sometimes the product image doesn’t load or is blank. The shopping comparison is handy and makes sense. Even though my colleague Jeff Doak pointed out to me that Amazon.com only gets 3 and a half checks out of 5. I’m guessing Shopping.com feeds those ratings.

The tabs are unique and the way they roll over without a mouse click is nice. But I’m not sure where they pull the blogs from. I could find no rhyme or reason to why the blogs that show up on any of the ad appear.

Relevancy
The jury is still out on this. I know that contextual is not perfect, and let’s face it, they’re not Google quality. As far as I can tell, the ads generate based heavily on the title tag.

For example, sometimes it’s perfect, and sometimes it’s, well, not. Look at Wayne Porter’s latest post posted to Adware & Spyware category. Title tag on page: “180Solutions: The Surprise Friends in Your Closet”.

The ad on the page is right on (at the time of this impression) showcasing an ad for spyware removal software. But when I reloaded the page, it showed an ad for Quickbooks. The next reload shows an ad for a “White Grid Wire Cube Collapsible”. Que???

Let’s try another category, SEM & PPC. That’s Search engine marketing and pay-per-click for those of you who don’t know. Beth Kirsch wrote a piece called Yahoo Tests Behavioral Marketing in its Quest to Beat AdSense. The Chitika ad on that page is for the Apple iPod 4th Generation. The second page reload is for, ahem, Playboy Magazine? Again, I say, Que?

Perhaps it’s simply that Chitika and it’s partner of shopping comparisons offerings (shopping.com) do not have the product to match our categories and topics. At least I hope that’s it. Your thoughts? Has anyone else tested these out?

Summary
I find the concept of these “ads” to be innovative. The key for Chitika is being able to put the right product in the face of the right customer, at the right time (isn’t that everyone’s problem?). If they can do that, then it’s extremely valuable and I believe will do extremely well, with a great chance to convert at a much higher ratio than traditional banner ads.

Perhaps ReveNews just isn’t the best place for these ads? I suppose a site more suited to a niche that actually has a lot of shopping products available would work best. If you can point me to another site using them like that we can investigate further.

I’ll let you know if they work out or not.

Update: 072805

Chitika has released two new ad sizes. Here they are below. They look pretty cool. May have to try these again at some point.

About Jim Kukral

You can find Jim on Twitter: @JimKukral.