Thumbs up or thumbs down to content rotators

[pasware]

Hi there - Our team is in the process of a website redesign. We're currently using a content rotator and are wondering if any folks have data to support whether this is actually a good practice despite it's popularity? Overall, I'm not impressed by the click throughs as a percentage of site traffic and most of our visitors are not repeat visitors so this may not really be necessary. Thoughts and experiences appreciated!

[EGOL]

That sounds like you have a site that people value.

I would use the rotators.  The number who return might move up.

The site where I use the most rotators has lots people who visit daily to get news.

I have a retail site with daily content rotation that has people who return a couple times per month.

For a while we were offering special price items that changed daily on one site.  That was bringing a nice number of people to the site to see "what is on sale today"... but we quit doing that because people were calling us wanting a special price from last week.

[pasware]

Thanks for the response EGOL that is helpful. To provide a more complete picture, I will add the data on our site visitors:

(37% return once, 13% return twice and 6% return a third time)

[EGOL]

If you have a website that has a high percentage of return visitors, content rotators can be beneficial.

We have....

...two blocks of content on our homepage that change every hour.

...lists of recent blog posts that update hourly and appear (by category) on related pages

...blocks of links to related content that change hourly with the content that we want to promote weighted for more frequent display

If you have lots of return visitors this keeps your site looking fresh. Page views and time on site went up when these were installed.