Planning for a Black Friday traffic spike on VTEX, how does MAU handle it?
Sizing our plan ahead of a big seasonal spike on VTEX and trying to get the numbers right before we commit. Our normal months sit comfortably inside our MAU, but the peak weeks will run well over.
Two things I want to understand for the sheet: how exactly MAU is counted during a spike, and what happens if we go over. Trying to avoid surprises when the traffic actually lands.
2 answers
Here is how the counting and the overage behave.
MAU is the count of unique users who interact with the site in a month, and extra volume is purchasable rather than a hard wall. The how MAU is counted page has the exact definition.
Two things worth putting on the sheet:
- Known bots do not count toward MAU on paid plans with bot traffic filtering enabled, which matters during a spike because crawler volume tends to rise alongside real traffic. See bot traffic filtering and overage.
- If you do exceed the MAU, returning users keep being served, and only new users are blocked until you enable overage or the next cycle starts. The Growth plan includes pay-as-you-go overage precisely for spikes, so enabling it beforehand keeps new visitors served through the peak.
The exact serving behavior at the quota boundary is in what happens to existing users when MAU is exceeded.
From how we planned our own seasonal peak: we forecast the spike weeks off last year's numbers, turned on bot filtering well ahead so the baseline was clean, and enabled overage before the campaign rather than discovering the ceiling live. The nice part is returning shoppers never notice anything even if you do brush the limit. We wrote up the Shopify side of the same exercise in planning a Black Friday MAU spike, the planning logic is identical on VTEX.