This year’s Super Bowl didn’t feature a lot of outstanding ads, but according to the latest data from Compete, quite a few advertisers were able to get a sizable share of the audience to head over to their websites on game day. The charge was led by Denny’s, which used its ads to offer a free breakfast to all Americans. Denny’s saw its traffic grow by almost 1700% on the day of the Super Bowl. For Etrade, on the other hand, the Super Bowl was a bust. Its traffic dropped by 57%.
While no other advertiser came close to Denny’s success, both Frio-Lay, with its ads for Cheetos (+313%), and PepsiCo, which actively promoted refresheverything.com (+199%) and gatorade.com (+143%), were able to attract a good number of TV viewers to their websites.
Interestingly, the ads for online video service Hulu.com only drove an additional 76% to the site. Other online services, like TeleFlora.com and the somewhat disreputable Cash4Gold.com only saw a modest increase of 65% and 50%.
Career websites like Monster.com and CarrerBuilder.com actually saw their traffic decline by 16% and 17%. Cars.com’s reach dropped by 22%, and Etrade, even though it had relatively funny ads, saw its traffic decline by a whopping 57%. These ads clearly only spoke to a small slice of the audience, though it would be interesting to see if and how their traffic recovered in the days following the Super Bowl.
Compete, together win TNS Media, also tracked the traditional and social media buzz around the ads in the days following the Super Bowl. Interestingly, interest in the ads dropped to almost zero within the first two days after the game.
