Updated to reflect first two weeks traffic

We launched a site a couple of weeks ago (26th March) at Fudge that uses Facebook Connect.

It's the first live site we've worked on that uses Connect as a method of user signup. We assumed it'd help build traffic relatively quickly but the results surprised us all.

The site's called Face of Bank and was developed for Bank Fashion, a chain of high-street shops. It's main aim is to recruit potential models for use in their advertising etc... Users sign up, gives us a little personal info, then pick a photo from their Facebook albums. Users then browse entries and vote for who they want to win. Again, the user signs in through Facebook first. Pretty simple.

As you'd expect, the target audience for the campaign fits in pretty well with Facebook's main demographic so we assumed it'd build traffic without too much effort.

User Signups

The site launched at 3pm on Friday 26th March and was seeded with 6 profiles (the handsome chaps at Fudge kindly obliged). This is how user signups grew over the next two weeks *:

A total of 120,580 users signed up over the first 14 days from going live. Pretty cool, no?

Traffic

Now compare that with some traffic stats for the same period **:

We had a total of 560,000 visits over the period generating 3,400,000 page views**.

Conclusion

We've always agreed with the idea that you should scale an app when you need to, not before. It turns out that we had to do that within 4 days of launch, just to keep the thing alive. That meant more aggressive caching and resource monitoring, and of course increased hardware capacity.

The first step was to scale up the capacity of the initial server. Then, on Friday 2nd we added a second server and load balanced the two. Thanks to the good people at Brightbox, we were able to do this within a couple of hours.

So, if I could pick one thing that we've learnt over the past week, it's that people love to be at the top of a list. Any list, as long as they're at the top of it :-)

* Data taken directly from the app. ** Data taken from Google Analytics.