Driving Ecommerce Growth for Automotive Leader Since 1999
Challenges
Creating advertising that effectively reaches the right audience is important to any company, but when it comes to Super Bowl Sunday, the stakes don’t get any higher. In its 6th consecutive year of television advertising on the Super Bowl broadcast, an average of over 108 million people per game have viewed WeatherTech’s commercials.
The goal of each TV advertising spot is to drive traffic to the WeatherTech website and on that scale, everything was on the line for the company. A crashed server or broken ecommerce functionality would spell disaster. WeatherTech required fail proof assurance that neither of these scenarios would occur. In addition, the company needed to optimize their visitors’ ecommerce shopping journey, such that it would not only provide a highly satisfactory user experience for buyers, but also maximize revenue for the company.
Solution
Preparations for Super Bowl Sunday started more than six months prior to game day. A series of 20+ servers utilizing replication technology were used, in addition to a cloud based, CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Extensive load tests were performed on the servers, with the number of website page requests far exceeding the expected amount during the Super Bowl. Hundreds of landing pages containing products on popular car models were cached in the CDN for lightning fast retrieval. The servers directly handled non-cached pages, such as checkout, shopping carts and others.
A “war room” was established, staffed by programmers server specialists and other essential team members. Servers were continually balanced and monitored throughout the day, to ensure optimal performance.
Ecommerce functionality was also carefully studied beforehand. Goal completion rates and purchasing funnels were evaluated from all devices (especially mobile) and extensive A/B testing was utilized. Speed was a top priority, so load testing and caching improvements were heavily relied upon. Shoppers who had products in their carts, but then abandoned them were sent personalized emails designed to reengage interest.
With 11X more traffic hitting the website that day and no performance problems, WeatherTech’s Super Bowl Sunday efforts were a great success. The partnership of WeatherTech and Americaneagle.com is based on more than 20 years of trust and measurable accomplishments.
Results
- 33k Server Call Per Minute
- 200% Increase in Total Revenue
- 474k Increase in Keyword Rankings
Americaneagle.com has continually exceeded my expectations since the last century and they're a big part of our success story. There's no possible way I would consider doing business with anyone else.