Insights
Reviewing the Digital Impact of 2023 Super Bowl Ads
While traffic to related domains surged on Super Bowl Sunday, brands with the biggest lasting digital impact included an explicit digital call to action in their ads
Some of the ads to be featured in 2024’s Super Bowl contest are already being previewed online, and no doubt brand webmasters are gearing up for what could be a potential server melting surge in traffic on game day. But will it have a lasting impact?
From what we see, any company thinking about spending $7 million or more on a Super Bowl ad should understand that it’s engaging in a form of sports betting with an uncertain payoff – at least in terms of online engagement.
We say that because Similarweb decided to compare website traffic for the 28 days leading up to last year’s Super Bowl, with the 28 days starting from Super Bowl Sunday. Adding up all the traffic from the related domains we could identify, we saw only about a 1% increase in traffic, on average. For many brands, the game day boost faded fast – and some even attracted less traffic in the days after the big event.
However, all traffic is not created equal, and not all ads are meant to drive website visits – Temu grew its website traffic tremendously, but the actual call-to-action in its ad was to download its shopping app – part of how it got to have one of this year’s most popular apps with American consumers. Meanwhile, ads for snacks, beer, and liquor are usually meant to drive people to look for a product at the grocery store, not to buy online.
But even for advertisers we classified as more digital, the average pre-to-post-game boost in traffic was about 2% – although some did much better. All the estimates cited below are based on traffic from within the US, where we would expect Super Bowl ads to have the greatest impact.
Clearest winner: hegetsus.com
The hegetsus.com domain for a campaign promoting the message of Jesus in sympathetic human terms ranks high, both in terms of percentage gain over the 28-day period (+72%) and absolute gain in number of visits to hegetsus.com (+1.3 million). Also ranking high was the hegetuspartners.com domain enticing churches to join in the campaign (which also made use of a QR code in its promotions).
Even a small percentage increase can equate to lots of traffic for a big brand
While small brands achieved big increases on a percentage basis, Amazon and Booking.com added many more actual visits based on smaller percentages (1.95% for Amazon and 12.2% for Booking.com). Temu was already on its way to becoming a huge digital Brand before the Super Bowl, and the 9.5% increase it got in the 28-day period accelerated its path to being one of the fastest growing digital brands of 2023.
Ads featuring a website call to action saw lasting benefit
Advertisers that explicitly drove viewers to a web domain like hegetsus.com, thefarmersdog.com, dexcom.com, booking.com, and weathertech.com – saw more consistent and long-term gains.
For the pre/post 28-day snapshot, weathertech.com was up 18.6%, booking.com was up 12.2%, dexcom.com was up 10.2%, and thefarmersdog.com was up 3.3%. All of these brands also ended 2023 with traffic up by double digits.
Percentage increase winner: Limit Break
The web3 / NFT game ad from Limit Break drove the biggest pre/post-game percentage increase, over 690%, although starting from a very small base – and not achieving a lasting increase. Within our 28-day snapshot, limitbreak.com attracted about 28,000 visits based on traffic. The startup’s ad featured a QR code directing viewers to the website.
In this view, the boost in traffic U2 got for a US concert ad looks much smaller, even though it represents five times more total traffic for the promotion of an appearance at The Sphere Experience in Las Vegas. The U2xSphere.com domain that flashed on screen attracted about 39,000 visits on game day, redirecting campaign-specific traffic to U2.com. U2.com got about 137,000 visits within the next 28 days – and for the full year attracted more than double the traffic it did the year before.
However, for limitbreak.com the boom in interest did not translate into a lasting improvement. Later in the year, traffic to the domain dropped below our minimum threshold for accurate estimates.
An insignificant post-game dip for sports brands
Our 28-day comparison doesn’t really work for key sports brands that saw a lot of traffic on game day but not the days that followed because their traffic was built around the anticipation of the game and dipped afterwards. But FanDuel, DraftKings, and NFL all saw an improvement for the full year.
A digital boost from Super Bowl advertising is possible – but far from guaranteed
While the post-game dip for a brand like FanDuel is easy to explain, we have a harder time explaining the dips in traffic for other digital brands including Intuit TurboTax (-12.5%) or Workday (-7.6%), let alone consumer goods websites like avocadosfrommexico.com, down 66.5% in the 28 days starting on Super Bowl Sunday. Possibly, we’re seeing the effect from the ending of marketing campaigns that actually began before game day. Note that Workday, and TurboTax, while certainly digital brands, contented themselves with featuring their brand name but not their domain name.
If driving web traffic and digital customer engagement is the payoff marketers are looking for, that ought to be an explicit part of the ad’s call-to-action – meaning a QR code, a domain displayed prominently at the end of the ad, or an appeal to download an app.
The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com.
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