24 Aug
Even in the age of super targeted online advertising, retailers and other businesses know nothing pushes traffic to a website as rapidly as a high-profile mention on television.
Despite the oversaturation of channels and the popularity of streaming services, prime-time television audiences are still huge. Marquee shows still pull in viewers in their millions, making TV advertising an important channel predominantly for B2C brands in 2021.
TV advertising vs online marketing
Strategies used online to optimize advertising spend are more difficult to implement in traditional TV campaigns. Demographics can be matched with the channel or show’s target audience. Based on age or interest, segmentation and personalization are much more advanced online where behavior can be tracked, and adverts placed accordingly.
However, technology has enabled some advancements in television advertising.
For example, during the UEFA Euros football tournament, boards around the perimeter of the pitches showed different adverts depending on which country or TV station the match was shown on. This is done using virtual replacement technology and allows many more region-specific ad slots to be sold than before.
Even when watching television, our mobile devices are never far out of reach, giving TV a strong conversion power for brands. This is especially evident during prime-time TV advertisement slots, which bump up website traffic to the advertised brands significantly.
The trouble is it can be hard to anticipate exactly how much traffic is going to hit the site. But whatever traffic does come is likely to arrive very suddenly, which can cause big problems for website performance and uptime.
For example, when fashion retailer JD Williams launched its first ever TV advert during the ad break of The X Factor, it could never have predicted the size of the spike in web traffic that ensued.
When it turned out the spike in traffic was 27 times bigger than Cyber Monday, the team was glad to have had TrafficDefender’s virtual waiting room in place to protect the site.
Virtual waiting rooms for managing TV advertising spikes
Virtual waiting rooms are the ideal solution for coping with massive interest generated by television advertising. This is especially true when factoring in just how quickly huge amounts of visitors can click through after seeing a product shown on TV, and when considering that other means of handling boosts in traffic can’t react quickly enough.
Autoscaling in the cloud is a great way to optimize infrastructure costs, whilst load balancers allow hosting technology to better handle the amount of traffic as it spreads across servers. However, both of these need time to “warm up” which makes them too slow to cope with “cliff face” spikes.
React instantly with a virtual waiting room
With a virtual waiting room in place, the website is always protected against performance issues or outages, no matter how much traffic arrives. Even if visitors flood in all at once, a virtual waiting room will stop excess users entering the site, meaning it can operate as normal and serve as many customers as the technology is capable of.
In the meantime, those additional visitors are placed into a first-in, first-out queue until it’s their turn to enter the site. During this time, they’ll be kept informed of offers, entertained by branded content and reassured that their wait will be worthwhile.
If you are planning to ramp up your TV advertising or are concerned what might happen to your site should your products get a prime-time mention, get in touch today.
