Traffic and advertising?
 

I think I already know the answer here, but I had a site with good traffic which was converting regular and quite well with around 3-4 programs - but now it has died off :(

So is this because my traffic has become used to seeing those programs and I have converted all I can convert and its time to look for some fresh programs, or... what else could it be?

Its a specific niche site

I would always change sponsors to give surfers a fresh look yes. Then go back to the main one every once in a while.

I agree with Ramster. Mix it up - but if it has converted for you in the past, keep room for it in your future. You should also look for similar sites from other sponsors and try those as well.

Good luck.

Some of the downturn might also be stale advertising graphics. You could try replacing them with fresh ones from the sponsors. And you could use OpenX or something similar to rotate sponsor graphics, text links and other promos so that returning surfers are seeing new visuals all the time.

Hard to say of course without looking at the site.

:)

One thing I do is use OpenX (until I get my own adserver coded up), so I can rotate banners. Besides that I also tend to float sponsors around a lot with it, I have some tools that will dig through the stats and for each main 'niche' will find me the sponsors that perform best, will keep the top 2 and disable the rest. Does this each week. Then same for the sponsors that are active, will check CTR on banners (sort-of normalised/averaged out for impressions and banner type and weight), and the top 4 in the CTR game get twice the weight (yes, self-fulfilling prophecy there almost), and they're all reset back to 0 at the beginning of each pay period.

Works for me, the average CTR for the last month across the whole thing was 2%, highest CTR to sponsor around 3%, highest CTR for a banner: 7%.

Those numbers are awesomesauce.

Thanks... good info :)

I'll take another look at OpenX... I had used it in the past, but it was a beast back then, really good info though, I was suprized at how little some banners actually got clicked |huh - but that helped with ad placement

@dunc, OpenX is still a beast. On the newest version, make sure you delete the "OpenX Market" plugins, or it's going to start sneaking it's own ads into your campaigns if you let it.

But when it comes to ad serving, unfortunately OpenX is one of the better ad servers, but it is totally and utterly geared towards mainstream. For us "adult" types, you need a bit of a different setup if you want your stats to eventually make sense :D (at least, in my humble opinion).

I blogged a bit about OpenX on my blog using my own setup as an example.