Advertisers Touting Super Payoff from Super Bowl
Dot-com advertisers that aired news spots in Sunday's game are reporting a beefed-up response, and justifying the game's hefty airtime price tag.
Some 131 million fans watched Sunday’s Super Bowl on CBS, and at least some of those visited the Web sites of its dot-com advertisers — which spent an upwards of $2 million per 30-second spot.
That price tag, combined with the staggering reversal of fortune for the Internet industry in 2000, caused most of last year’s 17 dot-com Super Bowl advertisers to stay away from a repeat — those that were still standing after the market shakeout. But those that stayed in as Super Bowl advertisers said they made the right call.
Online career site Monster.com, which aired a new spot from its new “Job Good. Life Good” campaign during the game, said it saw more than 40,000 resumes submitted through the site during the Monday afterward. It also said it recorded 8.1 million job searches performed. Both stats are nearly double the results of last year’s spot, and well above the site’s daily average. Page views also reached a record-high 32 million, it said.
“Our traffic figures following the game are an important indication as to the success of our campaign; we measure the strength of the traffic figures in three ways: the number of resume submissions, job searches, and job postings,” said Jeff Taylor, chief executive officer at Maynard, Mass.-based Monster. “Based on the traffic figures following this year’s game … the launch of the “Job Good. Life Good” campaign was a ‘Monster’ success.”
New York-based competitor HotJobs.com, which released a new spot in its “Onward, Upward” campaign during the game, also recorded record volume on its site.
On Monday, HotJobs.com said it hit an all-time high of 10 million page views, 121 percent higher than the previous Monday and 80 percent higher than the site’s average. It also saw a doubling in the rate of users creating new profiles.
“This year marks HotJobs’ third year as a Super Bowl advertiser and it just seems to get better and better,” said HotJobs’ CEO Richard Johnson. “The best part is that there is substance behind our numbers. The substantial increases in page views over the last two days is outstanding, but what I am most proud of is the 112 percent increase in new ‘myHotJobs’ profiles, as it clearly demonstrates that those who logged onto HotJobs.com are serious opportunity-seekers ready to move their careers and their lives onward and upward.”
Jupiter Media Metrix, which uses a panel to track online traffic, said its third-party tracking verified the sites’ beefed-up traffic, as compared to average traffic for the previous three weeks.
Based on Media Metrix’s data, Hotjobs.com and Monster.com had 328,000 and 706,000 unique visitors, respectively, increases of 101.3 and 5.3 percent.
The game’s third dot-com advertiser, online financial services site E-trade, did not disclose whether it had seen an upswing in traffic following its two new ads (one of which spoofed failed dot-coms) and its sponsorship of the Super Bowl halftime show.
However, Jupiter Media Metrix reported that the Menlo Park, Calif. company’s site saw 526,000 unique visitors, up 47.8 percent from the previous three-week period.
