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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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Online impact of Super Bowl ads

February 10, 2009

Excitement around two new movies caused the most immediate spike in visits to the websites of Super Bowl advertisers on Super Bowl Sunday. Promotion of the trailer for the 4th Fast & Furious movie resulted in the highest lift in visits among the websites of Super Bowl advertisers as compared to the previous day. The website for another highly anticipated release, Angels & Demons, ranked 2nd for increased visits on Super Bowl Sunday. Much of these lifts can be attributed to having a smaller web presence until the Super Bowl promotion, but this does help to measure the excitement around upcoming movie releases, particularly as the studios encourage visiting the website to view the trailer.

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On Monday, when the websites of the Super Bowl advertisers are ranked by the overall market share of visits, CareerBuilder and H&R Block were the most visited websites. Timing is also a factor for the ranking of both websites (as well as for 4th ranked Monster.com) with a large number of job seekers out in the market and tax season just underway.

SuperBowl Advertisers Rank Monday.png

The promise of a free breakfast caused the highest increase in search volume among the Super Bowl advertisers. The share of searches for a portfolio of Denny’s search terms increased 1836% for the week ending Feb. 7, 2009 as compared to the previous week. In addition to attracting visits, new movies also drove growth in search activity. The highest volume of search activity was for Transformers 2, which also ranked among the top 5 advertisers for the largest increase in search volume when compared to the previous week. Scandal proved to be a successful driver of search once again with a 413% spike for GoDaddy.com to view the Internet-only endings of the Super Bowl commercials.

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