• by Masha Geller , March 1, 2002

Sorry to pick the weekend to harp on something negative, but today’s topic is one advertisers should be paying more attention to. It’s the age-old issue of website functionality. mLife really brought it to the forefront when almost no one could get to their website following the Super Bowl, but now it looks like the main Olympics website didn’t really ensure that everyone can easily access their site either.

Jupiter Media Metrix and Mercury Interactive today reported that while the number of daily unique visitors to NBCOlympics.com far exceeded the traffic to any other Olympics web site during the 2002 Winter Games, the NBCOlympics.com site suffered from relatively weak technical performance. Media Metrix data reveal that traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked at slightly over two million unique visitors on February 21, while CNNSI.com's Olympics channel and SaltLake2002.com vied for second and third places with 683,000 and 666,000 unique visitors, respectively. During this time, Mercury Interactive data show that NBCOlympics.com averaged a nine second URL response time, compared with the seven second response time averaged by all other websites.

According to Mercury Interactive site performance data, the overall average availability of URLs on the Olympics Web sites monitored was 99.2%, with only 6% of Web pages taking longer than eight seconds to download. When measuring sample transactions on the sites -- which includes adding items to a cart, logging in and checking out -- Mercury found that only 95% of transactions were available and a whopping 13% took more than eight seconds to complete. While URL performance and availability is much improved over previous years of Olympic site performance, transaction times remain problematic.

As Diane Hagglund, director of product marketing for Mercury Interactive, put it, “From an overall technical standpoint, the Olympics-themed websites performed relatively well compared to previous years when high-profile Olympics sites were marred with notoriously poor performance. However, the problematic areas of the sites remain the online business transactions, which are often most closely tied to the company's revenue.”