NEW YORK Super Bowl ads always have winners and losers. It turns out that's no different when it comes to Web traffic. For the handful of advertisers who make money by getting people to their sites, recently released Web traffic data shows mixed results for advertisers looking at their numbers in the weeks after the big game was played.
The clear winner: Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp.-backed Web video service, which saw a 55 percent jump in traffic in February, going from 5 million to 7.8 million visitors, according to measurement service comScore. The jump made Hulu the No. 2 most-gaining property comScore tracks and vaulted it to the No. 6 Web-video property.
Hulu used the big game to air two spots starring Alec Baldwin. The commercials, created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, fared well in post-game viewer polls. Hulu's weekly traffic jumped nearly 100 percent after the game. It didn't hold all the traffic, but in the next two weeks settled into traffic levels at 50 percent above pre-game weekly totals.
GoDaddy.com's perennial Super Bowl titillation still packs a punch. Its Danica Patrick spot that directed viewers to its Internet address registration site resulted in a flood of traffic. ComScore tracked an increase from 1.8 million to 3.4 million in the week following the game. Two weeks later, it fell back to weekly traffic of 2.7 million, albeit a healthy 44 percent increase from pre-game levels.
Cash4Gold.com, albeit from a much lower base, also saw impressive traffic gains following its commercial with Ed McMahon and MC Hammer. It went from 59,000 visitors the week leading up to the Super Bowl to 65,000 for the next week. By the end of the month, its weekly traffic reached 109,000.
Yet for other advertisers, gains were either short-lived or more modest, according to comScore. Traffic to E*Trade, which brought back its talking baby for its spot, rose from 674,000 the week prior to the game to 1.7 million the following week. It quickly fell back to below pre-game levels in the following two weeks.
Two other advertisers not seeing many benefits in terms of traffic increases are job sites CareerBuilder and Monster Worldwide. The classified sites, regular Super Bowl advertisers, didn't see much extra traffic to their sites, despite the increase in layoffs in February. Traffic to their destinations declined in the four weeks following the Super Bowl.
According to Nielsen Media Research, which shares a parent company with Adweek, this year's Super Bowl was the most-watched in history, seen by 98.7 million people. Each 30-second commercial cost an average of $3 million.
