Faking Context Sensitive Chitika Ads

As you may have seen on the main site, we have added Chitika ads in combination with the Google Adsense ads that were already on the site. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Adsense, you are not allowed to have other ads on your site that are context sensitive (i.e. what is displayed in the ad is deduced automatically from the ad provider spidering the page).

We like the Chitika ads because they are dynamic (roll over them and the tabs change) but in addition to the ProductCritic Score, I keep getting asked to add the price of a product. While we have thought about doing that, it will still take awhile before we can add that functionality to the site. Instead, Chitika can help people who want that info (and help us at the same time).

To make it useful though, we needed to ensure that the Chitika ad was relevant to the product page. Since we already know what product we are displaying, it's as easy as adding a line like this to the Chitika script:

var ch_queries = new Array( "Canon A640" );

This tells the Chitika ad to use "Canon A640" as the keyword. This works great on the site and maintains our Terms of Service (TOS) with Google Adsense because we're the ones who are telling Chitika what product to put in the ad vs. Chitika determine that contextually.