Mon, 2nd Nov 2026 (Today)
MARA SUGUENews Editor
VentraIP has urged marketing teams to make landing page performance a central part of Black Friday and Cyber Monday planning, warning that slow or unavailable pages during peak sales periods can undermine campaign spending.
The warning comes as retailers prepare for heavy online traffic across the late-year discount season. Shopify has forecast that Australian consumers will spend AUD $6.8 billion over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, while Australia Post delivered almost 111 million parcels across November and December in the previous comparable period, up 7.6 per cent year on year.
VentraIP argued that the final destination for paid media campaigns is often overlooked when budgets are set and creative is signed off. A landing page that loads slowly or fails under traffic pressure can reduce return on advertising spend, regardless of how well media buying and offers have been planned.
VentraIP pointed to research commissioned by Google, in which Deloitte found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed increased retail conversions by 8.4 per cent and average order value by 9.2 per cent. The report also found that product pages carry particular weight for retailers because shoppers arriving from advertising often land there directly rather than on a homepage.
Website outages can carry a sharper cost. VentraIP cited the collapse of the Click Frenzy website during its launch as an early warning for online retailers, noting that the site failed within minutes of going live despite extra capacity being added and was not restored until later that evening. One reseller that had paid AUD $5,000 for a premium placement reportedly received no click-throughs during the first five hours.
More broadly, the company argued, marketing departments may not control the infrastructure behind a website but still bear the commercial impact when it fails. Businesses should check whether their hosting can handle traffic several times above normal levels and whether capacity can be increased quickly if demand exceeds forecasts.
VentraIP set out a checklist for marketers preparing for the sales period, starting with load testing based on expected traffic spikes rather than average daily patterns. It noted that sales traffic tends to arrive in bursts and can vary by platform and retailer.
Adyen data from the previous year showed that Australian online shopping peaked at 6pm AEST on Black Friday, while Shopify merchants in Australia saw a sales peak at 10am the same day. VentraIP said marketers should simulate spikes like these in advance and share expected traffic volumes with the teams managing hosting so they can prepare capacity.
It also recommended that stress testing focus on the exact pages used in advertising campaigns. Rather than checking a homepage on an office laptop, businesses should test campaign URLs on a mid-range phone over a mobile connection, because that more closely reflects the customer experience.
Deloitte’s research suggested users begin to lose focus once a page takes more than one second to load and are likely to become frustrated and abandon the task after ten seconds. VentraIP said marketers should review large hero images, remove retired tracking tags and unused third-party scripts, and check whether pop-ups or countdown timers are delaying the appearance of key content.
Another risk VentraIP identified is non-human traffic during major sale events. It cited Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report, which found that bots accounted for 53 per cent of all web traffic in 2025 and that malicious bots alone made up 40 per cent.
According to VentraIP, scraping tools, credential-stuffing attempts and checkout bots can consume server capacity during high-demand periods and distort campaign reporting. Marketers should verify whether bot filtering and rate limiting are enabled, and separate automated traffic from customer activity in performance analysis.
VentraIP also recommended freezing unnecessary changes during the sales window. It said many retail website failures can be traced to poor change management, denial-of-service attacks or insufficient hosting capacity. Businesses should therefore agree a change freeze, confirm that SSL certificates, domain renewals and payment integrations will not expire during the campaign, and identify who has authority to pause paid media if the site goes down.
VentraIP also argued that landing page copy deserves close review before launch. It pointed to an ACCC sweep of Black Friday promotions that found misleading or concerning claims at half of the 50 retailers it examined, including false urgency and discounts described as sitewide that did not apply across the full range.
The company’s central argument is that website readiness should be treated as part of the media plan rather than a final technical check. Retailers should add page speed and load testing to launch checklists, share traffic forecasts early with technical teams, and review site performance data after the sales period so future campaign planning is based on evidence rather than assumptions.
VentraIP also cited Shopify data showing that shoppers are researching purchases more carefully and increasingly using artificial intelligence tools to compare products before clicking through to retailer websites.
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