Change In Conversion Ratios
 

If anyone has any ideas about this, I'd really appreciate it!

In January 2004, I was converting at 1:375. This past January, I converted at 1:2496! The main difference is that most of my traffic in '04 came from google searches specific to each of the categories on my LL... This January, the only Google listing was for my index page, and the traffic had to come through to the categories that way... Is it possible there would be such a huge difference in conversions? I'm basically using the same sponsors, etc. Is anyone else seeing this kind of dropoff???

If you haven't done this yet, try changing up your ads.. Keep them fresh.

I agree.

Keep it FRESH! |bananna|

If you did loose a lot of niche specific traffic from SE's, then that very well could be the problem.

Most of my traffic is from google aswell, and I had easily the worst Jan I can remember with conversions down across the board. To put a figure on it I made $2k profit in Jan .... and I have a company with 2 full time and 3 part time webmasters/staff and a projected turnover of over 1mil this year, with half of that projected to be net profit.

Feb is looking better, but something massive has happened at google and I am only on the edge of working it out.

Definitely if the traffic is coming in through the index page - I would assume that its for more "general" terms and therefore definitely not as targetted.

As far as the shakeups at Google - I did finally figure out what was happening and I am testing the fixes right now - of course its hard to tell the results as they are in the middle of an update as we speak so it may be a week to tell the final results - but looking good so far :)

Thanks everyone...now I must get back to work getting my Google listings back

LB - sorry to hear you are having the same problems as I am...I hope it recovers for you soon

Thanks mate, but funnily enough yesterday I made some changes and had a record profit day. Strange.

|bananna|

I noticed something funny about search engine traffic, specially google and yahoo. I had a page on Teagan Presley at number five few months back. And then one on Jesse Jane at 8 when she got selected as something big (I don't remember for what but I did get a lot of traffic on it). Amazingly the conversions (from the store/links to pornstar sites with the particular girls) were really worthless. Maybe a sale a day or something like that. Now I have slipped onto the third page for Teagan and Fourth page for Jesse Jane, traffic is very low, but sales have picked up! I actually end up making thrice as many sales from third/fourth page traffic. Defies all predictions! Any ideas why?

the conversions are better probably because if you are attracting people that drill down to the 3rd page they are looking for something you specifically have - wheras the freebie surfers are going to click the first free link they see :)

I definitely agree with always changing up ads that you can, so as to keep a fresh look for surfers who've "been there, done that".
It's probably extrordinarily rare that we get surfers who have never seen our paysite or product before, unless it is brand spanking new. So you can make it look brand new again with fresh ads, even custom made ads.
Most content licenses allows you to use a few images for advertising, and I think thats a great way to show a *totally* new ad to your surfers.
In some cases, sponsors allow linking to the join page (see sig, lol) which allows you to make a whole custom tour..

But even swapping around banners can make a nice difference on "old" traffic!

I guess I agree with you Linkster! I generally write small bios for pornstars (about once a month) and all the films they have ever played in! Quite a bit of work I must say, but then if I get similar traffic for every pornstar then I won't be complaining lol.
By the way, since we are discussing search engines, and if no one else minds, I have major problems getting SE traffic to my stories, though they are keyword rich. I guess that is because they are quite long so SE give less importance to it, even though they have all the keywords repeated over multiple times. Do you think it will help to divide the stories in multiple pages?

Definitely split them up into pages - and make sure you have a good sitemap and links everywhere on the site to help with your backlinks and for the bots to find them all with no problem :)

Thanks Linkster!
I have started the work! Considering I have 80 odd stories to edit (apart from all the other work!!!) it'll take a few days but I'm at it! :-)