Gina and her team did everything right. They launched an inspired digital marketing campaign with a consistent, sticky message through all channels using multimedia content, including a clever video that went viral. Consequently, the traffic to the website exploded - and this is where the troubles began. The company’s website wasn’t able to cope with the mounting bandwidth that the successful digital marketing campaign required. The site nearly ground to a halt and pages started taking ages load. What could have been a massive success for the marketing team turned out to be a nightmare.
The problem with poor web performance is lost opportunities. In our fast-paced world, users expect websites and web applications to be fast and reliable, otherwise they will seek alternatives that are just a mouse-click away. A New York Times article quoted Harry Shum, a Microsoft computer scientist who said that “users will visit a Website less if its loading time is slower than its competitors by 250 milliseconds, or one-quarter of a second. That is less time than a single eye blink. According to Research from Aberdeen Group, a one second delay in page response will result in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and seven percent reduction in online sales.
Though our case is fictitious, there are many real stories like this out there because most marketers lack a basic understanding of the technical requirements for their campaigns and don’t start working with their IT colleagues early enough. If the marketers in this story had, their IT people would have anticipated that the high bandwidth requirements of this campaign would very likely compromise the website’s speed and performance. In this case they would have most likely opted to a) reject the campaign or, b) asked marketing to scale the campaign down or, c) add more servers to better meet the expected traffic peak demand. While in the first two cases the marketing team would have likely complained that IT makes the company miss great marketing opportunities, the last case might not have been approved by the CFO as adding more servers is expensive and they are rarely fully utilised during normal operations.
What all sides are probably unaware of is that a tiny and relatively inexpensive piece of software exists to help achieve a win-win outcome. The software is called a caching reverse proxy - a very techie piece of kit that not many marketers and not even many IT people will be aware of.
A reverse proxy acts just like an ordinary web server in that it intercepts all web requests before they reach a company’s web server. The advantages of a reverse proxy are that it caches the requested pages from the server, so the server avoids having to reproduce multiple impressions of the same page. This means that the next user can view the page without experiencing a delay. By doing so, it is able to serve up hundreds of consecutive requests per second, speeding up the website performance and reducing server load dramatically.
With a caching reverse proxy in place, marketers don’t need to worry that their campaigns cause high traffic peaks that stand to damage their company’s revenue and reputation, whereas IT is relieved from constantly having to worry about site performance and scalability. Finally the CFO is also happy because a caching reverse proxy means your business can run its website using a fraction of the servers you would normally need, saving you considerable money over time.
By Per Buer, CTO and Founder of Varnish Software.
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