Filed under: Networking Technology, Performance Monitoring

f you listen to the radio around Valentine’s Day, you hear endless commercials from companies soliciting their once-a-year products. I decided to perform my own test to unearth which ad was the most effective at attracting web traffic leading up to February 14th.  I monitored five different websites – 1800-Flowers, Edible Arrangements, Hallmark and Pajamagram – using PathView to see what their network performance looked like on the day of love.

To set the stage:

• The top line on each of the charts represents total capacity
• The light blue represents available capacity
• The dark blue represents utilized capacity
• Note – The black column represents connectivity loss from our testing environment. Our ISP connection briefly dropped

1800-Flowers

It looks like most of the traffic to 1800flowers.com (I assume the boyfriends, fiancés and husbands of the world) was conducted throughout the day on Feb. 12th, peaking the afternoon of the 13th. This is one of the sites where last minute shopping won’t hurt you, as they offer next-day or two-day delivery options. Around 4:00PM EST on the 13th we saw the highest peak of traffic … I’m sure the next-day delivery was a popular option here.

Edible Arrangements

Maybe shoppers didn’t want the bouquets of strawberries to spoil, as the greatest amount of utilized capacity we saw was on the afternoon of February 13th. The utilized capacity held steady throughout the day, peaking around lunch time at just over 55% of total capacity.

Hallmark

The highest utilized capacity on Hallmark.com was two days prior to Valentine’s Day. I thought traffic would spike earlier than February 12th, but the low cost for two-day and overnight shipping may have allowed more people to procrastinate and wait until quitting time the day before.

Pajamagram

This was a little different than the other entries. The highest peak of utilized capacity was again the day before, at 11AM EST. However, the path to pajamagram.com is showing very little available capacity throughout the snapshot.

What does this all mean? The site(s) I expected to carry the most traffic did, with the flowers winning out. This also goes to show that as a society, we don’t just procrastinate around Christmas, we procrasticate for any holiday. Hopefully your gift arrived on time for your Valentine.