Call it a good measure of analytics with some subjective rankings in the mix. Web performance company Gomez has released its first post-Super Bowl rankings of which advertisers' sites did the best job in the 18 hours following the big game.
Gomez's first Big Game Advertiser Benchmark took a look at how the game's ads impacted their advertisers' Web sites, with an eye to understanding whether they suffered from poor post-game site availability and performance that could have undermined their spots' effectiveness.
The top winner was Mars Snickers, while Hyundai's Sonata site ranked the lowest in Web site speed and availability.
Surprisingly, high-profile Internet domain registrar GoDaddy.com finished just behind Hyundai in 62nd and 63rd place for two of its commercials that explicitly invited viewers to visit its site to view more provocative versions of its cheesy story line with race car driver Danica Patrick. Search giant Google came in fourth place for its first Super Bowl ad campaign.
Gomez based its selection of the best ads on the rankings of USA Today and Time magazine, which analyzed gametime commercials based on popular preference via focus group and expert opinion, respectively. Gomez then used its own analytics to rank the companies behind the commercials based on the speed and availability of each brand's campaign Web site in the 18 hours following the game.
In addition to claiming the top ranking in Gomez's analysis, Snickers also topped USA Today 's Ad Meter list -- a finding that marks its effort as one of the most effective of the game.
While GoDaddy's performance was middle of the road, it was its editorial ranking that really hurt it in combined effectiveness, Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, told InternetNews.com . Meanwhile, "Hyundai wasn't bad on the editorial side but they were hurt by performance. It all has to work to be effective."
Following the Super Bowl, GoDaddy issued a statement saying its commercials were responsible for the biggest spikes in Internet traffic during the Super Bowl according to Web content delivery provider Akamai, whose network handled most of the content by Super Bowl advertisers.
Earlier this week, Gomez issued the results of a survey by Equation Research it sponsored of 1,500 consumers who use the Web at peak times for such popular online activities as holiday shopping, booking summer travel and executing stock trades during shifts in the financial markets. Seventy-eight percent of the consumers polled said they'd switched to a competitor's Web site because they encountered slowdowns, errors and transaction problems during peak traffic times.
David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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