Websites from Coca-Cola, Acura and film Act of Valor crashed Sunday night after being overwhelmed by Super Bowl ad-driven traffic. In Coke's case, a Facebook app featuring animated polar bears in the ads buckled under the strain. On the other hand, Kia's site had the most reliable, fastest performance of all Super Bowl advertisers Sunday night, according to Yottaa, a website optimization firm.
Yottaa monitored all the Super Bowl advertisers' sites Sunday and found those three sites were the only ones that crashed. Coke's site was down long enough for the company to put up a maintenance page. ActofValor.com, meanwhile, experienced at least six outages of five minutes. That site was also five times slower than average during the big game.
Meanwhile, Acura's homepage was working, but a call-to-action link wasn't. "With an ad spend of $3.5 million plus production costs for 30 seconds of a commercial, leaving visitors with a bad experience is not the way to launch a new car," Bob Buffone, Yottaa co-founder and CTO wrote on the company's blog.
Overall traffic to Super Bowl advertisers' websites fell 6%. Buffone notes that "Amazon reports that a 100 millisecond delay on its website equates to a 1% drop in revenue."
However, Buffone admits his pre-game predictions "sucked." Buffone noted that "Cars.com, TaxACT.com, GoDaddy.com and History.com all fared really well during the Super Bowl."
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