Inbound Marketing Blog by protocol 80

Paid Search Advertising and the Super Bowl

Written by Josh Curcio | January 31, 2014 // 9:58 AM

Everyone hears about the Super Bowl commercials. Rightfully so as plenty of creativity and TONS of money gets poured into these commercials. Not as many people are talking about AdWords and Super Bowl advertising...unless you are a search nerd like me! More of the ad spend for search will be spent before the Super Bowl as opposed to during the game, but there are a ton of opportunities for brands to get in front of a huge audience. What are some of the terms people might be searching?

  • super bowl
  • super bowl halftime show
  • super bowl weather
  • super bowl commercials
  • super bowl party recipes
  • super bowl bets

Now think about the different markets, industries and brands that would benefit by getting in front of these searchers. You'd have to have a decent budget to be competitive in the space, but the CPM would be infinitely less than that of a Super Bowl commercial. Let's just look at one of these terms.

"Super Bowl Recipes"

Many recipe websites make their money from selling ad space on their website, so by having more traffic essentially you get more ad revenue. If you just spent a small amount of time doing a really great job preparing various Super Bowl Party menus, it could have a long term positive affect for your site. The ones that would really benefit would be niche recipe sites. If I were the owner of a gluten free recipe website, there is no doubt in my mind that I would bid on "gluten free super bowl party recipes" and other variations of this. Don't waste the spend though. Put thought and effort into building your landing pages, writing content, having conversions and look at this as more of an investment for long term improvement.

Top Online Advertisers for the Super Bowl

Last year Sports Illustrated topped the list followed by ticket sellers, car manufacturers, and soft drink brands. Not surprising. Some of these are incorporating a marketing medium mix where they are capitalizing on visitors after seeing their Super Bowl Commercials. A good idea because people aren't clicking to their website from the commercial itself.

According to Adotas, between January and March of last year, $1.8 million was spent on Super Bowl related keywords through AdWords. This is via 780 advertisers which were no doubt a mix of enterprise level and small businesses.

Current AdWords Advertisers with Related Keywords

Just like other season times of the year, if you don't have the budget to keep up with the competition, make adjustments. If you have an AdWords campaign that will get a bunch of new traffic from this seasonal event, but that traffic won't benefit you be sure that you pause keywords, add negative keywords, reduce bids/budgets or whatever needs to be done to ensure you don't waste your ad spend. If you are a current AdWords advertiser that will benefit from that traffic, awesome and good luck!

Enjoy the game!