You spent the money. Your ad campaign is a lock; an untouchable winner. Pop the champagne corks now. But wait! Are you sure your web site can handle the traffic Super Bowl 50 will generate? With the potential for over 191 million viewers reacting to your ad, generating a possible 1000% increase in page views and billions of dollars at stake, even a successful Super Bowl ad campaign can still be thrown out of bounds by a less-than-immaculate web reception.
Even if you’re not one of the heavy hitters spending $5 million for a 30-second spot, a slow or buggy web experience can make your hall of fame marketing campaign a total dud.
Two-Minute Warning
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With only a few days left before the big game, retailers should be looking to sew up any last minute loose ends. In order to make your web site a winner, Dynatrace says you have to streamline. The success or failure of many advertisers will be based not on the infrastructure of the host but on the infrastructure of the third parties that will be providing them with services.
Many digital business owners load their sites up with extra features and functionalities in an effort to make them more appealing to consumers. But these additions increase the risk of failure, as many of the features that marketing departments love are actually driven by third-party applications or hosted on content delivery networks.
“A Facebook widget or pop-up chat isn’t going to make any difference to a customer who can’t even get a website to load,”said David Jones, Field Technical Evangelist, Dynatrace. “Reduce the number of objects, cut down on connections and scale back your reliance on third parties. It’s a lot more important to provide a smooth and consistent customer experience than to dazzle people with a few cute features.”
Even Instant Replay Is Too Slow For Consumers
If you’ve checked all of your content and third party partners and all is well, make sure your site is ready for the potential spike in traffic. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, consumer expectations are also at an all-time high. As a result, so is the cost of poor performance.
Dynatrace recently commissioned a survey on shopping trends and the findings indicate that only 68% of users will even give a site or mobile app a second chance if it fails to load on the first attempt. “That’s an immediate loss of 32%,”Jones said. “So, if a site is down for five minutes, by the time it’s back up and running, a huge number of users will already have abandoned it for good.”
“But it gets worse,” Jones added. “51% of Millennials surveyed also said that they would likely complain on social media after a poor digital experience, thus spreading the news of the bad experience to a broader audience that will now think twice before visiting that site. So providing a poor customer experience can not only damage your revenue, but also torpedo your brand equity with potential customers.”
Site Been Sacked? Have A Comeback Ready
Halftime is here and your site is down and out. The potential for losses is mounting and that trusting relationship you’ve built with your customers is face down on the turf. What can be done before you’re carried off the field horizontally? Have a solution to the problem rather than an announcement.
“The worst thing you can do after a customer-affecting outage is ask your customers for help fixing it,”said Ryan Bateman, Marketing Director, Dynatrace. “Instead of responding with ‘I’m sorry you experienced X issue, could you tell me more?’ take the extra few minutes to provide some context and a solution. You could turn that complaint into a success story with “I noticed you were using X browser attempting to access X page; we experienced X issue but to make it up to you, here is a promo code.”
And The Winner Is…
Whether Carolina or Denver prevails remains to be seen, but Dynatrace says every customer and retailer’s web site can be a winner with the right preparation. Check out last year’s live blog for some incredible insight into the big game’s winners and losers: http://apmblog.dynatrace.com/2015/01/30/super-bowl-ad-performance/
And be sure to follow this year’s live blog.
SUPER BOWL FACTS AND FIGURES
• Are You Going To Santa Clara?: MarketWatch tabulated that the average cost for one traveler from Denver, CO or Charlotte, NC, after airfare, tickets, and lodging at a hotel or Airbnb, would run about $7,300. And that’s not including the $10.25 it costs for one of Levi’s Stadium’s least expensive beers.
• Cheers: The U.S. consumes an estimated 1.25 billion chicken wings on game day. Americans were also reported to guzzle about 325 million gallons of beer.
• What A Bargain: Halftime acts are paid $0 but receive approximately $120 million worth of airtime.
• Food, Fumbles, Fun: 191.3 million Americans are planning to watch the game, spending an average of $89 each on food, beverage, apparel and electronics. Millennials are particularly embracing the event, with an average spend of $143 on the game.
