CDN Time To Live effect on conversion rate (5)
I was running a campaign and my ROI one day was 88%.
I then had to remove my landing page from my CDN and replace it with a different one, leaving the URL identical. 
So I uploaded a new LP, replacing the old one.
I use rackspace, so the field to change how often the CDN refreshes itself for new content is called Time To Live (TTL)
The default is 259200seconds, or 3 days. I needed the CDN to refresh asap, so I set it to 15 min or 900s, the minimum.
Everything looks great until I go to run a campaign with a lander in that same rackspace container.
The identical landing page that did 88% ROI, at the same time of day, same offer etc, now reduced ROI to breakeven.
The campaign I was running is on an established whitelist, I have sent traffic to it for weeks at a time with no loss in ROI before. The only change I made this time was modifying the TTL parameter.
Does anyone know if the modifying the TTL parameter can affect campaigns? or is the cause of this reduction in ROI something else?
thanks!
Well, it sounds like there are a number of things going on here - I am a little confused about whether you replaced lander A with lander B then saw a change, or if you kept lander A as is and just changed the TTL.
In any case, changing the TTL to 15 minutes will cause an impact but depending on what you cache and how much traffic you send.
If you are sending 1000 visits per day then its likely that the edge servers that your users get content from do not have cached versions of your files, and this leads to slower deliver.
If you are sending 100,000 visits per day in one country then its likely that every edge server is getting hit at least a few times in that 15 minute window, keeping the cache warmed - which should result in very little performance difference vs a 3 day TTL.
Lander A being replaced with B was because I needed a clean page there. I only needed B and the TTL change because if the advertiser went through my url and saw a LP, I needed them to see B. I changed the TTL because I could not wait 3 days for A to update to B.
When I was ready to run again, it was simply lander A again.
I was sending around 10000 visits/hour for a couple hours. Same time of day during both tests.
At AWS Cloudfront it is possible to "invalidate" the cache manually (takes a few minutes), I guess that should also be possible at rackspace?
Clear your CDN cache instead of changing the TTL value. Having low TTL can affect loading time for repeat visitors.
This shouldn't have affected your CR if most of your traffic are first time visitors.
Use CDN Edge purge to clear cache, https://support.rackspace.com/how-to...dn-edge-purge/
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