Super Bowl Advertising’s Impact on Online Traffic

With the Super Bowl played on Sunday, several of Covario’s clients who ran spots during the game are using the opportunity to measure the impact of offline ads on online traffic and brand interaction by measuring differences in search behavior over the event.  We have done this several years in a row for our customers –not just around the Super Bowl, but also around major sporting and cultural events like the Olympics and FIFA Euro Cup.  The impact of Event Marketing on search is strategically important, and intuitively surprising. 

Event marketing like the Super Bowl is different.  The size of the audience is so large, and the brand reach is so significant, that in almost every case there is a corresponding major impact on online traffic and brand interaction. What is strategic is that event marketing provides the ability for advertisers to get a strong read on how offline advertising impacts online behavior.  And this understanding can potentially be used to gauge how other investments in offline, specifically sponsorships and TV spots, drive online behavior.  We will ignore for the moment that the correlation between online spend and offline result is not really transferrable to day to day program TV spots  on online performance given the entirely different nature of the audience and the size of the audience, but it does help create a statistic about how these important channels interrelate – and they do. 

Second, the results are often intuitively surprising.  An advertiser doing a Super Bowl ad would probably enter the ad with a hypothesis something along the lines of “I will get a huge uptick in casual visitors to the site, and if they get there through paid search, I will get huge uptick in cost, as well as cost per acquisitions as the overall conversion rate will go down.”  i.e., broadcast media is a dull instrument that moves the masses, but is terrible at identifying qualified site traffic.      

This is not the result we usually see.  In the previous Super Bowl, we did this study for one of our advertisers.  Here are the results.

• We used the time period before the Super Bowl as a baseline – so we would measure results for the 3 days after the event to the 3 days before; the 2 weeks after to the 2 weeks before; and the 3 weeks after to the 3 weeks before, and so on. 
• We did see a big increase in the costs, clicks, impressions and general visitors to the site.  So first part of the hypothesis confirmed.  Check!
• However, after the initial 3 day spurt where we saw the CTR and CPA increase slightly, we say two key issues – there was 3-4 weeks of sustained interest in the brand and the CPAs actually got much BETTER.  The second half of the hypothesis was rejected!
• And this behavior is completely consistent with other studies we have done around other events like FIFA Euro Cup and the Olympics. 

So this leads to the question of “why?”  Apparently they were far more effective at identifying key customers segments and socializing the brand with an online call to action that drove significant results. Just through search, we saw conversions up 50-60% on a gross amount over the 3-4 weeks after then event, even though click volume goes down, and they did not return to pre-event levels until after 4 weeks, where even then they sustained a 10% higher continuous run rate than pre-event. 

Was the expenditure on the Super Bowl Ad worth it for this advertiser?  A rough estimate says that the spots run cost ~$12-15M at the time of this experiment.  The increase in online traffic just through paid search created a 4 week ROI of $3-3.5M, and an ongoing 10% higher run rate, which if attributed to the Super Bowl Ads, had a continuous value over 12 months of ~$4.0-4.5M.  We did not factor in organic or direct to site, however assuming that paid search contributes ~50% of the online results, we could say that there was ~$10M in attributable value to the organization from the ads.   So at a high level, directly attributable one year value does not justify the expenditure. And now commence with discussion of “all the other things that pulled through from this ad” from a branding standpoint – but attribution modeling is for another blog.

• ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1:  Attributing online value to event marketing programs like the Super Bowl is a valuable exercise.  We recommend the methodology of using the pre-event time period as a benchmark in a particular locality and comparing to the same time period post event marketing program to measure lift and change in behavior.
• ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2:  Event Marketing usually “works” – by this we mean that it drives large increases in traffic quickly, and conversion results within 3-4 weeks at rates far above pre-event levels.
• ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #3:  Event Marketing has a sustainability of 4 weeks in most cases, meaning that paid search marketers should plan on increased budget levels for 4 weeks after the events, or risk going dark on keywords relating to the campaigns.

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