Determining CPC for Revenue AND Inventory

[moheybee]

I've never really posted in this forum before, but I am presented with a dilemma and thought I'd see what the experts think.

One of the advertising programs we offer on our website is Hot Deals.

Advertisers can create their own Hot Deal ads that include a small picture and a few lines of text through our custom advertising system. Four of the Hot Deal ads appear somewhere on most of our pages and there is a Hot Deals page linked to from our menu.

The program is getting ~20k clicks a month. The CPC is $0.10 (we aren't in a very high profit industry).

The problem is that only two of the largest companies advertising on our website are using it. The smaller guys say the ROI just isn't there for this program, like our other programs that they continue to use.

We would like 10+ companies using it because it would be much more useful to our visitors and we are interested in having a Hot Deal weekly newsletter in the future and we would certainly want more than two companies listed in it.

And so the question becomes: can we make the program appeal to the smaller advertisers without significantly cutting into the revenue?

Thoughts?

[eljefe3]

Have you polled the advetisers to see where it would be profitable for them? This would be a good start to finding out where it would fly for the advertiser.

If you could get enough advertisers pushing the hot deals you could make up on volume what you're losing out on in margin.