Planning for Black Friday, how does the MAU quota behave during a traffic spike?
We run personalisation on our storefront and Black Friday week will push us well past our usual MAU. Want to know ahead of time what actually happens at the quota rather than finding out on the day. Do users get errors? Does the site degrade? And is there anything I should switch on now so the spike is a non-event. On Growth currently.
2 answers
Nothing breaks at the quota, and there is one switch worth enabling before the spike.
How the quota behaves:
- Returning users who were already counted this billing cycle keep being served personalized content as usual.
- Only brand new users above the quota are not personalized; they wait until overage is enabled or the next billing cycle starts.
- Any user outside the quota sees the default slot content through the SDK's built-in fallback content, so the site keeps working normally. No errors, no blank sections.
Since you are on Growth, the plan supports pay-as-you-go overage. Enabling it ahead of Black Friday turns the quota into a billing detail rather than a limit: new users above the included volume are simply served and metered.
With overage enabled ahead of time, the spike is invisible to visitors.
We went through our first peak season on Croct last year, so one practical note from experience: because the fallback is your default slot content, make sure the defaults themselves are Black Friday appropriate. We had a generic hero as the default and a promo hero as the experience, so the few brand new visitors above quota (before we enabled overage) saw the generic one. Not broken, just off-message. Setting the default to the promo content for the week solved it completely.