A Boatload of Traffic is Coming Your Way. Now what?
A checklist for the 10,000% spike
Earlier this month, we learned that Level was going to be featured in a sizable newsletter (1M+ subscribers). We had several days notice, but during that time were not able to find any consolidated advice on preparing for a huge spike in visitors.
We managed to cover the bases and get things mostly right, but learned a few things along the way. Now we have a burndown list we’ll use for similar opportunities, which I am sharing here in case others find it useful.
Gathering the info
Task number one is finding out as much as possible about the size and nature of the anticipated traffic. How much to expect over what time period? What’s the usual breakdown between desktop and mobile? Will it come from multiple sources (e.g., email, web, app)?
Learn as much as you can from the partner so that you can optimize the next set of decisions.
Creating a customized experience
Instead of just linking to your home page, you’ll want to set up a landing page tailored to the audience and specific context. If you can, run the copy by the partner to make sure it’s consistent with their voice, or even let them create it for you.
Think about narrowing the scope of what your are presenting. Driving towards a single action is easier than trying to educate people about what you do more generally. For us, this meant focusing on our photo printing and framing feature, which is only one part of Level.
Tracking
You’ll set up a new URL for the landing page. We appended ours with a discount code that triggered a special offer at checkout.
Run the URL through Google’s link builder to generate a link with UTM parameters. If the mention will show up across multiple channels (e.g., email and website), create UTM links for each one and forward them for the partner to use. Now Google Analytics can effectively track the campaign and different channels.
Worth looking into is Heap Analytics, a nice tool that lets you capture user actions and analyze them after the fact without having to pre-define any specific events or funnels.
Chartbeat ended up being useful for viewing real-time data, and their notification system will send an email or SMS if your servers start running into load time issues.
Don’t forget about email
Make sure there’s a way for people who don’t convert right away to provide their email. Instead of using your regular subscription funnel, create a new email list in Mailchimp (or whatever you use) or use tagging so that you can segment later on. We received 10x the number of email signups we had seen in the previous five months, and knowing where they came from is really handy.
In addition to email sign-up on the landing page, we branched our checkout flow into two steps, the first being an order summary page that requires an email to continue. You will always lose a portion of users at that last credit card step, so capturing email here gives us a better shot at converting them later on.
We also threw in some simple share/tweet/follow buttons at the last minute. They were not well optimized, but we gained 100’s of new fans and followers. It might feel spammy and you don’t want to plaster social buttons everywhere, but they actually work.
Magic Pixels
This is a good time to install pixels that can later be used for conversion tracking or retargeting. If you are doing any Facebook advertising, you’ll want to create two categories of FB pixels: Custom audience and conversion tracking.
Creating a custom audience pixel for the landing page will let you run ads or boosted posts targeting anyone who visited. You can set this up from the “Audience” tab in FB’s Ad Manager
For conversion pixels, found in the “Conversion Tracking” tab, we created and installed:
- A pixel for the landing page,
- A pixel for the order confirmation page, and
- An entire site pixel.
This allowed us to break out our funnel and segment by people who actually made a purchase. Twitter and Pinterest also have pixels and meta tags for tracking, maybe we will try them next time.
Testing 1–2–3
Once you have the landing page configured and your tracking is set up, go through the flow repeatedly, testing on computer, phone and tablet. See if you can cut out any steps or make any of the copy more clear.
We ended up removing an entire page in the process and found a few bugs that would have been problematic, including a pretty big breakdown that was occurring on an older version of iOS.
Scaling issues
Don’t forget to make sure you can actually handle the incoming traffic. If you run your site on Heroku, check out the Adept Scale add-on which automatically scales up your dynos if they start running up against a response time threshold. In our case, the newsletter was going out at 3 a.m. PT, so we were able to get a little more sleep knowing that Adept Scale was at the wheel.
The day before the mention we also decided to configure page caching on our landing and other top level pages. Definitely a pain to set up, especially if you are rendering dynamic data, but worth it in that the site will feel snappier and you will save money on the number of dynos you’ll need. With Heroku, we can also recommend the Memcachier add-on.
When the traffic hits
The newsletter went out super early, so we missed the beginning but were at battle stations by 6. Google Analytics and Chartbeat were the main tools we used for monitoring. It was a rush to see concurrent users go over 1,000 at one point, and gratifying to see the site hold up.
A fair amount of emails came in, which we kept up with pretty well. They were mainly questions, but also some feedback that ended up being useful.
Olark (or any live chat integration) was useful for responding to simple questions in real time, taking some of the burden off our inboxes.
Everyone who reached out appreciated the quick response, and became more likely to make a purchase.
After the dust settles
Ok, hopefully your site didn’t crash and you’re rolling in all kinds of sales, sign-ups, leads, fans and followers, email subs, or whatever you were hoping for. Now it’s time to think about follow-ups for the upcoming days and weeks. If you do this part well, your baseline of traffic/sales will always be a little higher after each surge.
Here are a few actions we spent time on:
- On the same day, post the mention on your social accounts with a shout out to the partner. You can boost those Tweets or FB Posts to reach people from the partner’s audience who may have missed it initially.
- Create a retargeting strategy for the next 2 to 4 weeks for people who hit the landing page or took specific actions. You can exclude people who converted if you’ve set up your pixels properly.
- Send an email newsletter within 1 to 2 weeks to the new sign-ups (also excluding people who converted), thanking them and letting them know about any special offer. We took this opportunity to also mention other things Level can do aside from photos.
- Design a special thank you for new customers. For us, this was a customized note tucked into their frame orders.
- Update the partner with your thanks, and as much data as you can share on traffic, bounce rate, conversions, etc. If this was successful for both sides, there may be an opportunity to do it again.
I’ll try to update this post if we pick up any new learnings from our own traffic or elsewhere. Let me or Damian know if we missed anything or can answer any questions!
If you found this to be useful, feel free to share or hit the Recommend button below. I’ll write more about building Level at @jhubball and @Levelframes.
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