Marketers buying time during the Super Bowl broadcast face challenges in determining the return on investment of their spots. They’ll face even more challenges if their websites aren’t designed to handle resulting surges in traffic… and Yottaa.com, a website optimization firm, is betting they aren’t.
Yottaa has released its predictions for the five sites most likely to either crash entirely or slow down considerably during the big game. They are, in order of likelihood:
Cars.com
GoDaddy.com
Taxact.com
History.com
Twitter.com
“We see this all the time,” says Yottaa’s VP of marketing William Toll. “Anytime a major advertiser has its product featured on any program with a significant audience, such as early morning shows or Oprah, there are slowdowns in usability and crashes.”
Granted, Twitter won’t be advertising during the Super Bowl. But use of the service will soar during Sunday evening, especially with smartphones and tablets as likely to be within viewers’ reach as chips and dip are.
Yottaa’s engineers take several factors into account when predicting potential website failures. One is the number of elements a given site incorporates. By way of example, Cars.com is ranked as most likely to fumble during the game, is one megabyte large and takes more than six second to load, according to Yottaa’s calculations. The Cars.com site boasts 124 elements, including 50 images, 35 JavaScript files, 23 HTML files, six CSS files and 10 other files (as of this writing, that is: Site designs are often in flux).
The danger with a site that pulls in widgets from other locations, such as Twitter, Facebook or Doubleclick, is that if one of those outside widgets fails and the marketer’s site isn’t properly optimized, the marketer’s site may have trouble loading, Toll says.
The number of elements on a site is only one factor Yottaa uses in generating its list of most-likely-to-crash sites. Others include the total size of the site, the specific outside elements a site hosts (some are less stable than others), overall time to load and changes to load time during the past month.
In contrast to Cars.com, Kia boasts one of the strongest sites among all the Super Bowl advertisers, according to Yottaa. Kia’s page is only 83 kilobits large, hosts a minute six elements and loads in four-tenths of one second.
This is good, because there is additional pressure on tech advertisers to have their sites perform well.
“When you think about automobile advertisers, a lot of them are performance companies such as Audi,” says Toll. “If their website goes down or is slow, that’s not a good perception they want to paint in the minds of consumers.”
Yottaa’s predictions aren’t perfect: A Super Bowl advertiser can throw off its guesses by directing consumers to optimized microsites set up just to handle the day’s traffic. But while this will skew Yottaa’s pre-game guesses, the company still plans on capturing information on those sites as quickly as it can during the game.
Yottaa is inviting consumers to participate in its track-the-ad-site-crashes program. Consumers can follow sites’ progress on Twitter by using the #burstbowl hash tag, or they can make their own predictions on Yottaa’s burstbowl2012.com page.
Provided, of course, the site doesn’t crash during the game.
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