We all know how statistics can be very useful for measuring your blogs performance. It can show whether your visits are up, how long a person lingers on your blog and even what links they are clicking. Using stats delivered by programs such as Google Analytics or Woopra can help you define whether or not certain actions are necessary. You may notice a downturn in visits coincided with the fact that you had decreased your posting frequency which would tell you that you should pull your finger out and step up your posts a little.

The thing that most programs don’t tell you is how you stack up with other sites, which is why I was pretty pleased when I got this email from Chitika. It seems that they took it upon themselves to analyze my Chitika account over a 7 day period which they then compared to 50 high-earning Chitika Publishers. They then emailed me the results in the hope that it would help me increase my earnings, which would, naturally, also increase theirs. Here are my results and their recommendations.

1. Traffic: My daily average was 1,155, and although there wasn’t a comparison, I reckon it must have been low by there standards as they recommended I read the following articles to increase it Problogger, Copyblogger, Wikihow. Yep, OK, I reckon I may take the time to do that one day.
2. U.S Traffic: This is important because according to them “It is well-known in the ad industry that the US market is the most developed and lucrative.” Now, Whereas Chitika Top Performer averages were at 53.29%, mine was only 42.2%, and their recommendation? “Needs Improvement. You can see where your traffic is coming from at sites like Spyfu.com, or in your Google Analytics (if you aren’t running analytics software yet, you should be!)” Shit guys, I thought that was pretty good myself, but no worries, I’ll get that whip out and make sure I improve those stats.
3. U.S. Search Engine Traffic SEO: This relates to U.S. traffic sent via search engines which triggers their premium ads. Apparently, this type of traffic is important because advertisers are willing to pay more for this type of traffic, but more importantly, people who come via search engines are more likely to click on ads. My results; 40.71% as compared to Chitika Top Perfoming average of 46.6%. Damn if those guys still weren’t too happy with my results. “Need improvement here – working on your SEO will be a tremendous help to your site (and your revenue!) over time. Check out Problogger’s recent SEO article, Hubspot’s Website Grader, SEOChat, SEOBook (and their blog), SEOMoz (also has a great blog), and about a million other sites you can find on Alltop. “
4. CTR or Click Through Rate: I produced 0.72% compared to their top performers of 1.59%. Yep, I certainly need to improve on that, and lucky for me they had more recommendations. “You should make some changes to your ads. To improve CTR, the most important thing is placement – check out this guide for tips. Other items that will boost your CTR are customizing your colors, fonts, etc. You can read how to do that here.“

The thing is that even though I may appear a little flippant, I really appreciate the fact that the guys at Chitika took enough of an interest in my blogs that they took the effort to produce that report. That is a sign of a good affiliate program. For those of you who are not using Chitika, perhaps you will find some of these links of use.

Other related Posts:

• January Statistics For WassupBlog
• Is Chitika Better Than Google Adsense?
• Chitika Has Proven Their Ads Actually Work