I was contacted by Google yesterday about my AdSense account. I guess our ads were “a risk to Adsense’s publishers” (more here), when really I think the issue was that we were getting close to our first payout. I immediately appealed, however I noticed that less than 1% of all appeals actually get approved and the account reinstated. That wasn’t very good odds, so I went searching for new companies.

I came along AdBrite, which is known for having problems with their Contextual matches and totally unrelated ads, however they were the best choice for us. To steer clear of their “irrelevant” ads, I choose to manually review all ads (for your benefit). So far it has been very painstaking (a word?), however their website makes it very easy and simple to approve them. They give you a preview for most (no 3rd party previews) and you can select the ones you want on that page and approve/reject them. However, if you approve/reject them from page 1, the page 2 ones don’t move up, which makes it very convenient. So far no clicks have been recorded, which makes sense because I didn’t finalize and attach the code till an hour ago.

Also, thanks to a recommendation from , I noticed a company called Chikita. At first I wasn’t too interested because they were primarily based on search engine referrers and only 61% of our traffic was coming from search engines, so it wouldn’t be a very cost effective way of advertising. However, that method of advertising is very unique and seems to be very effective. After a little “help” from , I was convinced and decided to join. I was approved almost instantly and I began to customize. The process is very friendly, and I loved that I could provide an alternate ad (AdBrite) in-case the user didn’t arrive from a search engine or if he wasn’t in the US or Canada.

Finally, I needed an easy way to organize all of this stuff, so I went with OpenX. They offer a software package that you can either host on them or install on your own server. I opted to have it be hosted by them and I was approved today (I registered yesterday). It takes a few minutes to get oriented with the site, however it is very easy to get the hang of and soon you will have full control over your ads.  I was unable to track clicks with either AdBrite and Chitika at the moment, however hopefully I will get that working and so I will just have to visit my OpenX dashboard to view everything I could ever want!

Note: To use Chikita with OpenX, or any ad server, you need to request special code from them. I have emailed Vik and I will keep you posted.

Stay tuned for a full Chikita review!
- James Hartig

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