I immediately hated Coinbase's Super Bowl ad. The last thing I want is for more people to be tricked into signing up for a bitcoin pyramid scheme. I also thought, seeing that colorful QR code bouncing off the screen like a screensaver from the 90s, that it was going to blow up in the company's face.
He was right.
Surojit Chatterjee, Coinbase's chief product officer, said that Coinbase received more than 20 million visits to its landing page in one minute. The company's app also experienced unprecedented traffic. Chatterjee added: "We are ready for you."
No, they were not. The site and app crashed for about an hour. This is not a good look for any business.
Some people said that the ad got a lot of traffic because it was new and attractive. No, it was not. There was a lot of traffic because the QR code promised people €15 worth of Bitcoin if they signed up for a Coinbase account before February 15.
People love everything that is free; of course they crashed the site. I could have predicted it in the same way that I can predict that if you drop a heavy rock on your foot, you're going to say "Ouch" a second later. There is nothing special.
Coinbase should have realized this as well. And your business should too. Any time you offer something for free or an offer that sounds too good to be true, your online presence will suffer.
Therefore, you better make sure your websites and services are ready for it. Here are some simple steps to keep your business running.
First, before the expected spike in traffic, make sure your website software and hardware are up to the task. You want your sites to be served and your services highlighted by the latest and greatest programs.
Your software must also be tuned to deliver the fastest possible performance. Bad JavaScript code, unoptimized images, too many HTTP requests – all these and more can slow down a website just when it needs to be as fast as possible.
If your sites and services are hosted by another company, make sure they don't impose data caps that limit incoming and outgoing data to protect their servers. Some web hosting companies do this with the details hidden in the fine print. If it's cloud-based, make sure you've provisioned enough resources to handle a flood of traffic.
While you're at it, find out if your host or cloud provider has had any issues. Just when you launch a big advertising campaign is not the time to find out that they have their own problems.
Let's say you've done all these things and you're still getting too much traffic. A smart CIO will already have signed an agreement with a content delivery network (CDN).
The main job of a CDN is to reduce latency by shortening the distance between a website visitor and your server. It works as a web tier cache. But, today, it can also serve as the last defender against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This latter feature can keep you in business when dealing not with attackers but with customers trying to get through your virtual doors.
There are many CDNs, but my favorite is Cloudflare. It's incredibly easy to use; just updated your DNS nameservers to use Cloudflare and it works automatically. I have used it for years and its service has never failed me. I can also recommend other CDNs like Akamai, Fastly, and StackPath.
The goal of all of these steps is to ensure that when customers show up, you can deliver on what you promised. Fast delivery of a website or service is more important than you think.
Akamai has found that the best loading time for a website is 2 seconds or less. For every second beyond that, you lose a huge percentage of your potential audience. Coinbase can say that it got 4 million visits, but since the site was not very responsive, I doubt it ever reached that number of actual visits.
Okay, Coinbase has also received a lot of social media news and buzz from its hype, but tell me: do you think people will trust a company that makes real money, not fun money in crypto, by managing their bitcoin? ? I doubt it.
The smart thing for your business to do is make sure your online presence is up to the challenges it will face. It probably won't make the headlines, but it will do a lot more to make your company's final efforts successful.
So read this:
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.