The Marketleap Report
Vol. 1 - Issue #2 - March 23, 2001

Planning and Tracking - Madness and the Light Ahead 
By Keith Boswell

Hunger for information and sports fever left the web servers exhausted from the load. ESPN.com struggled to keep pace with the requests. College basketball fans expected to find the usual depth of analysis and statistics that made ESPN one of the leading sports information brands.

Instead, during the kickoff of the NCAA Basketball tournament last week, ESPN.com web site visitors connected a mere 49.7% of the time. If you could get the page to load, it took about 7.3 seconds to connect according to web measurement company Keynote Systems.

How could an online leader in sports information not be prepared for its audience? Presumably it has traffic data and usage statistics going back to at least 1996. They have played host to expanded college basketball tournament coverage through their web site at least five times. In the offline world they have been tracking television ratings since their inception. Advertising rates depend on it!

ESPN.com is reporting that it received about 62 million page views last Thursday. According to the stats, that means they also missed about 62 million page views. Ad revenue was lost and frustrated visitors went elsewhere.

From a users perspective, ESPN.com no longer appears prepared to serve as a leader or reliable source for up-to-date information. The Yahoo, CBS and the NCAA sites were prepared for the surge in traffic and maintained 99% site reliability.

Planning and tracking are essential to doing good business on the web. Preliminary planning, research and review are critical pieces of the web-building process that are often discarded in the rush to succeed online.

One of the by-products created when web fever hit was the belief that projects should be delivered faster. What that meant to web builders was barely-planned web businesses looking to cash in without ever setting up measurements for success and evolution.

Builders were perceived as magicians, able to conjure up web magic with little more than poorly assembled outlines and dated Word documents. When these online initiatives did not have the explosive impact expected, the finger often turned to the teams that had been contracted to help assemble the franken-sites.

In reality, online businesses have the information they need to withstand the kind of stress test ESPN.com just experienced. Every web site generates a log of its traffic. Understanding site traffic and usage provides a verifiable road map of how a site is being used. That data should be used to evolve a successful e-business.

When the time is taken to thoroughly analyze the data, companies gain the benefit of testing against their assumptions from the planning phase. Vision and reality begin to mesh as certain patterns emerge. Where are visitors spending time? Are certain functions being used as much as anticipated?

The truth is web sites put all businesses into the software cycle. In order to gain the productive advantages that software seeks to create, businesses must come to fully understand this. Implementation and building are only successful when the planning, testing and monitoring phases are done properly.

Monitoring would have helped ESPN. Had they reviewed previous usage spikes that had occurred around March Madness and done proper planning, their web servers would have been available for every page request last week. And their audience (or over 50% of it) would not have been disappointed.

There are plenty of software packages that analyze site usage. The best ones assist companies in understanding how users interact with their organization. Web sites should accumulate three to six months of data before moving forward with new initiatives. Test assumptions.

Site builds should always be based on new assumptions that analyze how your site is being used right now. Release of version 1.0, is a quick stop on the evolutionary track towards expanded services. Successful builds are based on audience behavior.

When does your busy season hit now? Do you have several times of year that your resources are at full capacity? Are you planning a big news release? You don't need Internet smarts to understand the web is just an extension of the entire organization.

Small businesses can notify their service providers if they expect traffic to spike. If you are running promotions or giveaways, consider the possibility that it could spread well beyond the original target audience. Talk to your providers and give them a worst-case scenario. Just to be safe.

No other form of business gives you the ability to chart your business's performance so accurately. If you threw a party and invited 50 of your friends but only prepared for 10 of them, how dumb do you look when everyone shows up? Would you really expect anyone to come back a little later, while you geared up for the real party?

Your web server is throwing a party every day. Get used to it. The parties probably won't get smaller unless you serve up something stale, or you're not prepared for the crowd. Know your audience because they are your drivers. Listen and ask for assistance, you'll get great directions and never get caught with your web down.