Years ago, when I worked at another agency, we had a direct response client who used our agency for media planning and buying services only. A few days after launching a campaign, I sent the client some preliminary results that showed rather dismal conversion rates across the board. He called me back in a panic.
I explained that I had suspicions about his hosting provider and that he should consider upgrading his bandwidth now that his company was rolling out a campaign. The client replied that there was no way latency was responsible for the low conversion rates.
Later in the day, after I had pulled some data that showed a huge across-the-board dropoff from clicks to page landings, and supplemented that with some uptime graphs from Netcraft, his tune changed. We paused the campaign, changed providers and re-launched. Conversion rates blew away the results we had seen previously.
In retrospect, a bandwidth check should be standard operating procedure before launching a campaign of significant size. We know about the classic examples of how live events like Victoria's Secret lingerie shows and IBM's human versus computer chess matches can bring web servers to their knees, but sometimes we forget that a large ad campaign can have the same effect.
Before launching any sort of outbound campaign that's expected to bring in a significant amount of web traffic, check with your hosting provider or IT professional to make sure the incremental demand won't slow your site down to a crawl or cause a fatal web server crash.
