More than just expensive ad time, the Super Bowl is a unique opportunity for brands.Viewers of the Big Game are far more likely to ?take the bait? and move their engagement with the brand online. This is a marketer’s dream come true: willing participants in the brand’s messaging are the best kind of consumers.They’re far more likely to play along with games, contests, videos, social media, and whatever else a brand?s online marketing team throws at them.

What those eager viewers actually find when they go online, though, is another story.When a customer visits a website that is slow (or even down), they leave or form a poor perception of the brand. They don?t hear the message, they don?t share the story, and they don?t come back. Site speed and website reliability matter.

Yottaa #BurstBowl 2012

Here at Yottaa we are passionate about website speed and reliability.In celebration of the biggest advertising and sporting event of the year we decided to have our own Bowl: the #BurstBowlWe?ve been tracking the performance of all known Super Bowl advertisers? home pages for weeks, and we?ll continue to do so throughout the game and afterward.If any sites slow down or go down, we?ll know right away.

We’ve already made some predictions about which sites that will perform best (we see you, Kia.com), and which will crash and burn (ah hem, Cars.com), based on their current performance metrics. To judge the sites we use the Yottaa Score, our very own performance metric that?s a compilation of the most crucial factors in site performance.[See more about the Yottaa score below.

After the Super Bowl we will announce the winners and losers of the #BurstBowl?but in the meantime Tweet at us with your own predictions. What sites do you think are going to crash or slow down significantly? Use the Yottaa performance chart on burstbowl2012.com to help you make your predictions. Predict correctly and you could win an Amazon Kindle Fire!

We hope the horrible fate of crashing doesn?t befall any of the advertisers in thisyear?s Super Bowl (just kidding, we kinda do). But regardless we?ll say: Play fair, and may the best site win!

The Yottaa Score factors in how fast the site displays the page title, the time it takes for core content to appear and the time it takes for the page to be fully usable (?time to interact?.) The score ranges from 0 to 100. A higher score means a better page load user experience. Looking at the chart we can clearly see that sites vary greatly in their web performance.

Remember, visit www.burstbowl2012.com and place your vote!