Panning & Preparing for a Traffic Spike

Digital marketing has assumed monolithic proportions. Today, it has become a billion-dollar industry. Every small and large company utilises the WWW platform to market its products and services. Digital marketing allows companies to find out more about their customers, their behaviour, and their preferences. It is also an affordable option to increase sales.

Internet marketing is conducted in the following ways:

1. Pay per click: Advertisements that are visible on the search results page, generally on the right and top panels. Marketers have to bid for keywords.
2. Banner Ads: Usually found at the top or on the right side of many popular websites.
3. Organic search engine marketing: Natural links that are generated by search engines when a user searches for a particular keyword.
4. Blog and article marketing: Using backlinks to impress search engines.
5. Social media marketing: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile pages.
6. Email marketing: One the oldest but still going strong.

Organic search engine marketing requires tweaking of websites to a great extent. Digital marketing specialists, in tandem with search engine optimisation experts, fine-tune several parameters of a website to find first-page listings in search engines. One of the tweaks that is done to the website is preparing the site for a traffic spike.

So what is a traffic spike, and how does this affect the marketing strategies of a company?

Traffic spikes occur when a company launches content in the form of a webpage, video, or audio file, which suddenly takes the fancy of millions of users. This sudden interest in the content, which could be business-orientated or general, puts a lot of load on the servers. Websites typically crash at these moments. This results in a loss of revenue because the visitors might be buyers or potential customers.

Is there a way to prepare or prevent such a scenario?

Yes. By creating an alternative, a lightweight version of the original content, which has gone viral. It could be a mobile site that can be viewed on desktop PCs.

These lightweight pages can be created by minimising the use of images/flash and server scripts. It can also be achieved by caching the essential output of dynamic content to reduce server load.

The other alternatives that programmatic digital agencies use are to build alternate sites on platforms like Blogger, Google Docs, or Google Sites.

Yet another way is to use CDN, or content delivery network.

These are website optimisation procedures, which are crucial to fetching a better search engine rank. Traffic spikes cause happiness as well as gloom. Marketers love spikes, especially when they have evolved a new strategy that is paying off. At the same time, it also brings goosebumps. A site crash is one of their major worries. The above-mentioned tips help resolve many spike-related problems, but eventually, it all depends on the infrastructure on which it is built.

Some of the other ways to prevent crashes during spikes are to offer file downloads that are not heavy in size. Text files are typically lighter than PDF’s. XML and CSV are better options than complex web pages with lots of tables and columns.