Rotating banners for stable CTR

[byepolar]

Hi,

If you're banner advertising on websites is it a good idea to rotate the banner, say weekly, in order to maintain a stable CTR?

I've noticed I get a huge boost in traffic the first 3 or 4 days, then it steadily declines. In order to remedy this, I thought about switching out the banner every week and then starting over at the first banner at the end of 1 or 2 months time.

Is this a good practice? Will it give stability to my CTR? Is this a common problem in banner advertising, and what can be done about it? Is my proposed method good enough?

[incywincy]

i would say that it depends on the nature of the site's visitors. if the site has repeat visitors then maybe, if they're usually always 'once only' visitors then it will obviously make no difference.

my site visitors are mostly 'once only', to cater for this i serve ads on a visitor session basis so that each visitor sees a rotation of ads. i calculated the average page views per visitor and then serve this number of different ads per visitor.

[shaadi]

Yes it is. Rotating banners does give a stable CTR but the issue is to serve them & track them.

Look at my recently post Outsourcing ad serving [webmasterworld.com]

[byepolar]

I do track them. It's pretty general. I mean, I look at my hits each day from a given referrer in my web counter.

[Shak]

banner burnout is what you are referring to.

many articles on the topic.

I always recommend changing banners on a regular basis.

Its difficult enough to get clicks, never mind if you have already shown the banner 1000s of times to the same group of users.

Shak

[StanBo]

The idea in itself is good, BUT

The vast majority of sites tend to have more or less stable audience. Thus, sooner or later your offer (not a particular ad, but rather anything related to a particular...widget... fill fail to attract any notable attention at all) ads rotation can postpone that moment but can NEVER eliminate it, unless you work with a big network, rather than with a particular site.

In short, on the early stage of a campaign such an approach is highly recommended, but later on it becomes nothing more than a waste of extra time/money/effort/whatnot.