Big money Super Bowl ads pumped some life into those dot-coms that still had the money to pay for them.
Super Bowl advertisers Hotjobs.com and E*Trade.com saw huge traffic spikes, Jupiter Media Metrix reported Wednesday.
Between Super Bowl Sunday and Jan. 29, Hotjobs saw traffic soar 101 percent over average two-day periods in the past three weeks, to 328,000 unique visitors. E*Trade increased traffic almost 50 percent to 526,000 unique visitors.
Monster.com received 706,000 unique visitors during the two-day period, an increase of about 5 percent over average two-day periods in the previous three weeks.
While Jupiter's estimated traffic increase following Monster's Super Bowl ad efforts was not heart-stopping, CEO Jeff Taylor said, “The launch of the 'Job Good. Life Good' campaign was a monster success.”
Monster measured the strength of this traffic by recording the number of resume submissions, job searches and job postings.
There were more than 42,500 job postings on Jan. 29, a 172 percent jump from the day before Super Bowl XXXV and a 123 percent increase compared with the Monday after last year's Super Bowl. The number of postings jumped a whopping 432 percent from the 8,000 resumes submitted the day after the Super Bowl in 1999, when Monster was still in its infancy.
Monster said 8.1 million job searches were performed after this year's game. Job searches on the day after the Super Bowl have doubled each year since 1999, when there were 2.2 million searches. The most telling sign of Super Bowl ad effectiveness may be that the 8.1 million job searches on Jan. 29 represented a 300 percent increase over the 2 million searches performed the day before this year's game.
The company reported a 60 percent hike in job postings, from 17,200 on the day after the Super Bowl last year to 27,700 this year.
Separately, Internet traffic to Web sites affiliated with CBS, the official broadcaster of Super Bowl XXXV, skyrocketed from the hype generated by the game.
CBS.com Web sites saw 858,000 unique visitors on Super Bowl Sunday and the following Monday. This represents a 200 percent increase over the average two-day period for the previous three weeks, Jupiter reported.
SportsLine.com and affiliates lured 1.1 million unique visitors, an 84.5 percent increase over the average two-day period in the previous three weeks.
NFL.com had 422,000 unique visitors, a 33 percent increase over the average in the previous three-week period.
Traffic to non-CBS affiliates enjoyed the Super Bowl hype as well.
But Internet marketers know that traffic spikes do not necessarily lead to revenue spikes. Pets.com is the poster child. It reported huge traffic increases following last year's Super Bowl ads, which established its sock puppet as a recognizable symbol, but the company has since gone under.
Pets.com and other dot-coms comprised 47 percent of Super Bowl advertisers last year. This year, they represented just 7 percent.
Traditional companies with traditional revenue models accounted for 59 percent of Super Bowl advertisers, an 18 percent increase from last year.
