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Did Black Friday and Cyber Monday Cripple Analytics?

November 26th, 2007 Posted in Google Analytics, Omniture

To say it’s been a crazy Thanksgiving long-weekend for our American brothers and sisters across the border is an understatement. First came Black Friday, a day designed by marketers to kick off the holiday shopping madness with deep “discounts” and one-day specials. The term Cyber Monday was coined back in 2005, and conceived especially for online retailers that wanted to cash in on the same revenues Black Friday promotions garnered. Last year around this time the traffic generated by sales crippled direct debit systems, did we survive this year? Maybe not…

Google Analytics Proves Free isn’t Cheap

In some cases, the best things in marketing are free. Google Analytics still chugs along just as reliably as ever, even with the tremendous stress that both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have to offer. Surprising, given the sheer amount of small businesses and online business that rely on the free Analytics program.

Pro Tip: Keep a close eye on your Analytics and Adwords account metrics though, as large amounts of impressions and clicks over a short amount of time may cause reporting delays.

Omniture Still Troublesome

Large Analytics companies are feeling the heat, as Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter subscribers have reported experiencing serious bandwidth and report generating problems with all the marketing traffic generated by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Apparently, users reported several problems accessing entire reports that timed out on successive attempts, experienced longer than normal reporting delays when reports did generate properly, and some users were simply forcibly logged off the system.

Pro Tip: Automated reports were unaffected by these problems, as server-side processing was still sufficient to support generating reports and e-mailing them to recipients during off-peak hours.

Pro Tip: Inform Omniture and other analytics providers such as WebTrends about expected traffic peaks as a possible consequence of new paid advertising campaigns, promotions, or seasonal spikes.

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