Can the impact of Super Bowl ads be measured in search?

It’s been a few weeks, and it looks like the real winners in the Super Bowl are the companies that posted big ads during the half time break in the game. I recently sorted through some data to see what effect big ads like these have on certain brands, and what that could tell us.

Ad Age recently published a piece on data, compiled by ListenFirst Media, about 10 products advertised during the Super Bowl. They created a scorecard to show which brand gained the most followers, likes, and other social media responses, which I think is a pretty valid way to judge the success of an ad campaign. I took some of these same brands and put them through Google Trends to see what’s been happening with them. I think we need more than seven days’ worth of trends to find out the definitive answer, but Lexus looks to have some steady growth right after the game and during the days that followed.

Jeep had the biggest interest of the day of the brands we looked at, as well as Wix (much as I want to ignore them) and Groupon. Australia did quite well with its Crocodile Dundee parody ad, but Google Trends had a bit of a surprise for me there. Australia had a bit of a spike, then dropped off as expected, but then spiked back up again, and I wanted to figure out why. I looked for search terms and found that people were Googling “Australia” because of a controversy in an American university. A professor claimed that we weren’t a country, and that’s what caused the spike. Perfect opportunity for the Australian Tourism Board, if you ask me. 

Still, when it’s all added up, the biggest gorilla in the room was still Amazon. They’re the largest online retailer in the US, and there’s every indication that the same thing is going to happen here.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.

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