Digital marketers can benefit from deploying a content delivery network (CDN), an effective tool that absorbs the shock of peak online traffic to websites. Naturally, during the festive season streaming platforms, broadcasters, financial services, gaming and e-commerce sites witnessed a spike in traffic. While conventional wisdom may be to strip down websites so they load faster, the need for digital marketers to differentiate their customer experience means sites need to offer rich multimedia services. Whether its customers transferring cash or a twelve-day binge of their favourite TV shows, CDNs deployed by the likes of Channel 4, L’Oréal and Western Union improve the visitor’s experience.
However, CDNs are not just necessary to prepare for peak traffic periods like Christmas. When it comes to building audience satisfaction, it’s critical that digital marketers maintain optimum performance for users 365 days of the year. When 75% of customers report leaving for a competitor site rather than experience delays (Source: Gomez*), delivering a well-performing site safeguards returns. With websites being prone to downtime not only during the busy holiday season, here are five ways CDNs are beneficial to digital marketers and heads of customer experience all year round.
1. Everything, everywhere, all the time
So you have just scaled your campaign, now you are hoping to reach more customers. But what’s next? When it comes to international brands, users around the world want their online experience to feel local. Increased levels of traffic disrupt the success of personalisation efforts made by digital marketers to generate a great website experience. Operating on a private network, CDNs offer global scale through their ability to handle extremely high surges in traffic. The increased flexibility means that for that shopper 6,000 miles away, they can still be as much part of the action as someone closer to your offices. For e-tail and digital marketers, content can be delivered to an audience with reduced latency and improved performance, bypassing all the congested public internet.
2. Showing up on time
Today, it is widely accepted that the internet is breaking down barriers to trade, markets and communication. However, merely reaching global audiences is not the only thing to consider when it comes to maintaining the reputation of your business. If your website is not consistently fast, and available to an international audience of users, the reach and reputation of your brand can be affected. When building an online presence, you want your brand to be easily accessible regardless of time zone or internet speed. One key technique CDNs use to drive the availability of content across the world is proactive monitoring, which involves gathering intelligent data that protects your website against potential downtime. This means that your trusty website can reach the optimum amount of people all the time.
3. Deeper data digging
Acting against downtime with data is a great way of discerning what is happening to every single customer. Those of you preoccupied with encouraging greater personalisation, benefit from having unbound access to how your customers experience your website. The geo-reporting capabilities of CDNs are a great way for heads of consumer experience to drill deeper for microdata, providing insights into unique visitor experience. Maybe you want to know which pages are more popular, if a user cannot interact with one of the features on the page such as the “Add to cart”, or perhaps the “Play” button does not react at the same speed. All year round, CDNs monitor the improvements made from gaining more visitors. This means you are constantly in the know into why it took that extra second to load in one country than another and other variations in interaction.
4. Fending off those attacks
As if it’s not enough having a website that is slow during busy periods of the day, a distributed denial-of-service attack can pose a major risk to the reputation of a brand. These attacks can overwhelm your systems with malicious traffic that can cost tens of thousands of pounds ever minute. Bringing on board a CDN prevents these nasty surprises from rearing their ugly heads. The infrastructure works best by identifying, then diverting malicious traffic without compromising your website performance. Those catching up on House of Cards on holiday will be grateful that the content quality is impeccable whilst sat on a beach 4,000 miles away from home. Your users can get the most out of your website without having to worry about making risky clicks at home or abroad.
5. Handling content how you want
Requests to purge content can take ages. Perhaps you got your pricing wrong, or you’re launching a TV series on demand for the first time and need to get your timing right. Speed of delivery is critical for engaging consumers and for digital marketers, it's becoming increasingly important to be timely and flexible enough to quickly remove outdated or incorrect content. Digital marketers will need to face up to the pressures of keeping content constantly flowing on the platform. Have the flexibility to handle your platform the way you want with a CDN during period periods.
Already this year, the pressure of consumer demand has meant some sites like the retailer, Macy’s, have slowed down and even buckled under the pressure of e-commerce traffic following Christmas. Deploying CDNs are a vital tool for brands wanting to expand their reach globally, build individual user experience and boost customer satisfaction. Digital marketers need to better predict these spikes in demand, enabling them to maintain control of the content and deliver high-quality web performance for customers all year round.
By Jonathan Smith, managing director EMEA at Limelight Networks
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