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November 2012 Archives
What's that Spike? How the Best Retailers Load Test ...
Now that Cyber Monday has passed, we've left the most daunting of the 2012 traffic peaks behind us. US retailers were largely stable and available this year, with few catastrophic site failures. In general, retailers are much more mature with their readiness planning, starting earlier, and conducting load tests and simulations right before peak. For those of you tracking our Net Retail Traffic Index this past weekend, you may have
Cyber Monday 9PM Purchasing Peak 104% Above Black Fr ...
Reaching a unique cookie conversion rate of 5.1% at the 11PM hour Morning show broadcasts reported on the hottest Cyber Monday deals at the 9AM EST hour along with many online publications doing the same yesterday morning. But most online consumers didn't need any encouragement to get shopping - most continued with their clicking exercises right through the morning commute. Early browsing behaviors mirrored those of Black Friday quite closely.
Cyber Monday Purchasing Activity beat Black Friday b ...
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Cyber Monday Breaks New Traffic Records
Before we call it a night after a long but exciting day watching the Retail Net Usage Index, I owe you the final details. Cyber Monday traffic first began to climb early this morning, at 6:00 AM ET, and steadily grew to an early record peak at 11:00 AM. Traffic held steady at these levels until about 2:00 PM - a much stronger midday than in previous years. Then shoppers turned
Cyber Monday Purchase Behavior Projections
ComScore expects Cyber Monday sales to be up 20% from 2011. They predict consumers to spend upwards of $1.5 billion today, the Monday following Black Friday & the Thanksgiving holiday. But what trends can we identify in online consumers' behavior leading up to Cyber Monday in the ADS Data Platform? Before we dive into 2012 Cyber predictions, let's review the days leading up to Black Friday, a predominantly off-line shopping
Cyber Monday Set to Be Biggest Test Yet
While Cyber Monday typically drives the most revenue during the holiday weekend, in 2011 it fell short in driving either the most traffic, or the highest traffic peaks. Thanksgiving and Black Friday took those honors. This is somewhat expected; Black Friday and Thanksgiving are historically marketed as offline shopping days and therefore traffic on those days is in some part an indicator of offline purchase research. However Cyber Monday is
Huge Traffic Volumes on Black Friday
It was a strong Black Friday online by all accounts. IBM is reporting that sales on the day grew nearly 20% over last year. Black Friday also drove huge volumes of traffic, averaging over 6.3 million page views from 10AM Eastern through to the end of the night. As expected, peak traffic levels hit at approximately 11am ET, but there was no lull in the high volumes of traffic
Strong Start to Black Friday
In years past, Black Friday is the only day to reach its peak early in the day, with all other days peaking at 9 or 10:00 PM in the evening. Last year on Black Friday we reached peak by 11:00 AM ET, and in 2010 we hit peak by 1:00 PM ET. As I mentioned in the previous post, Black Friday may drive higher volumes all day but its peak
Another Hockey Stick Thanksgiving
Last year Thanksgiving Day was our biggest traffic growth day, growing 70% over the year prior, and driving our highest peak traffic of the Holiday weekend - beating out even CyberMonday - at 9:00 PM Eastern. With the early doorbusters once again causing controversy, we all expected another breakout year for shopping on Thanksgiving Day. By all accounts, Thanksgiving was a blow out traffic day. With an
What's more important to consumers: Turkey or Shoppi ...
While mentions of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock have been few and far between, one thing's for sure, I cannot even begin to count the number of times I've heard "online shopping data," "peak traffic," "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday" over the past few weeks. In addition to site traffic patterns from Lelah Manz, Akamai's Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) has access to a cornucopia of behavioral shopping data. In
The Proven Holiday Readiness Game Plan: An Interview ...
On this very calm Thanksgiving Eve, it's a perfect time to share with you all a "behind the scenes" look at how Akamai's commerce experts are engaging with retailers in preparation for this weekend. As Akamai is working with 96 of the IR100, we have broad visibility into holiday readiness preparations and what retailers are really expecting this season. To get a sense of what's to come this weekend, who
The Case for Imagination
My daughter's favorite TV show is "SpongeBob SquarePants." She loves it. Nothing else even comes close. Because she's such a fan, I downloaded the top 100 episodes on the family iPad and we watched one in bed last Sunday.In the episode, titular character SpongeBob and his pal Patrick claim that all you need to have fun is an empty cardboard box. When their friend Squidward asks why they're interested in
What a DDoS attack may be trying to hide
Earlier this month, Akamai held its second annual Financial Services Security Roundtable in London. The session was hosted by one of our global banking customers, and attended by numerous banks from London and Ireland. The meeting was held under Chatham House Rule, a well-known format in the UK, but not as well known in the U.S. and other regions. Under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the
End-Users' Web Experience Expectations Just Keep Get ...
People have high expectations. Web performance is no different. End-users expect fast and engaging web experiences. It doesn't matter if they use a PC, smartphone or tablet to interact with your web application. According to recent end-user research 89 percent of tablet, 59 percent of smartphone and 83 percent of PC users expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less. Now if we compare web performance expectations to
Let the Holiday Shopping Season Begin
And so it begins! In the US, we can now expect the Holiday carols to beam through every store audio system and the early bird holiday sales to begin in full force. Akamai's Commerce team has been hard at work these last 9 months, side by side with many of our global Commerce customers preparing for another online holiday shopping season. As we inch closer to various online holiday shopping-related
Is Web and Mobile Application Performance A Business ...
At this point it's well documented that no one likes to wait for webpages to load. On top of it organizations across industries understand that web performance impacts the bottom line.The problem is delivering fast, rich, engaging web experiences across an increasing variety of browsers, mobile devices, networks and locations is not easy. To find out more about the challenges of delivering quality web and mobile experiences in this complex
New Video Quality Study Examines Causes of Viewer Be ...
Online video viewers are willing to wait two seconds for a file to load before they start abandoning the content for something else. This is according to a new study of online video stream quality that analyzed an unprecedented 23 million views from 6.7 million unique viewers across the Akamai network.The study, "Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior: Inferring Causality using Quasi-Experimental Designs," takes a scientific look at how changes
Are You Hunting or Farming?
If you want your online business to keep pace, you need to find new customers and retain existing ones.According to Internet Retailer, Amazon grew its business 40.6% last year. If we're being honest about the world of e-commerce, the reality is that there's Amazon, and then there's everyone else. Amazon sets the standard.But let's ignore Amazon's $48 billion in revenue and focus instead on its growth number: Did your business