<p>Two or three times a year, Bon-Ton Stores products are featured on Jill's "Steals and Deals" segment on the "Today Show." The products are promoted with huge discounts. As soon as the segment first airs on the East Coast, the "Steals and Deals" site displays the featured products, with links to Bon-Ton's site, usually directly to the deal itself with a special promotion or coupon code. The questions that come up for the business owners are: How successful are these campaigns? What is impacting campaign success? How do we ensure better alignment with IT for future promotions?</p><p>How successful are my marketing campaigns?Bon-Ton uses its APM solution to analyze statistics of these special promotions. The following graph shows the number of requests hitting the promoted deal on Bon-Ton's site after it airs on the "Today Show." As customers rush to their site to bag the deals, it's great to see the number of requests spike when the show airs in the different time zones. Besides the number of requests (green) they also look at metrics such as CPU utilization on its application servers, which shows a very close correlation.</p><p>What is the impact of individual promotions on the application Infrastructure?</p><p>Knowing the impact of promotions on the infrastructure allows the business to coordinate future promotions better with IT to ensure that the required resources are ready. It also gives architects the chance to optimize the website to better handle these peak loads, e.g., adding more servers during promotion periods (either on-premise or in the cloud).</p><p><a href="http://www.sys-con.com/node/2601600">Keep reading...</a></p>