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February 05, 2013

Super Bowl Advertisers Experience Some Hits and Misses in Web Performance

By Brittany Walters-Bearden, TMCnet Contributor

Talkshow hosts and journalists across the country have been discussing their lists of hits and misses for the Super Bowl, discussing their favorite (and least favorite) commercials. While these subjective impressions largely echo how Americans rank the commercials, Keynote, a provider of Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring, has decided to use a different set of metrics. 



In a statement on February 5, Keynote announced “the winners and the losers” of Super Bowl advertising, based on their Web performance across all types of devices. According to Keynote, retailers and automakers had the strongest performance; “Maybe all those Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays have put them through their paces?” 

No matter how creepy GoDaddy’s commercial may have been, they were the winner of the ‘desktop’ category. Axe won in the ‘tablet’ category, and BestBuy won in the ‘smartphone’ category.

Consumer packaged goods did not fare as well, “notably, Coca-Cola with its heavily promoted ‘Coke Chase campaign, showed unacceptably slow response times on mobile devices and even desktops.” The site, they said, crashed repeatedly, the smartphone site was completely unavailable, and the 30 percent of desktop visitors who were not turned away faced 15-second response times from the site. 

Some of the other contenders for the ‘worst of’ awards included Walt Disney Pictures’s Oz, and, surprisingly, Samsung (News - Alert).

Nick Halsey, chief marketing officer at Keynote, echoed the sentiments of most – that spending a fortune on an advertising campaign only to have a website fail is not an effective strategy. He suggested companies begin testing and monitoring their sites across all devices prior to special events; “It’s not enough to simply hope the desktop site will run on a mobile device, particularly when some of the content is rich video and animation.”

For businesses, this sends an important message: having information available online is no longer enough. It must be easy to access and easy to use across all devices. Like those who failed on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (News - Alert) in years past, this year’s losers will most likely step up their game to become next year’s winners.




Edited by Braden Becker
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