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Singular saw a massive 10X spike in traffic on Super Bowl Sunday, proving that super expensive Super Bowl ads can actually be super effective. The intriguing part: you sometimes don’t even need to buy an $8 million 30-second Super Bowl ad to cash in on the annual football frenzy.
And the spill-over impact on your brand can massively boost click-through rates on ad impressions delivered elsewhere.
10X traffic spike: no sweat
It’s not every day you get a 10X spike. While weekends are typically much busier than weekdays, it’s usually just a 2-3X jump. But on February 9th, the day of Super Bowl 59, Singular’s servers managed 10X our normal weekday volume and 5X our typical weekend volume.
And did it without flinching. No sweat, no stumbling, no missed measurement or tracking: no downtime.
See for yourself on the Singular Status tracker:
But it’s actually more than a 10X surge
If you spend big for a massive marketing event, you want big results. But there’s always a risk, and the bigger the bet, the bigger the risk.
At least 10 Singular clients were among the 65 brands that took that bet and ran Super Bowl ads this year. They immediately saw a huge surge in traffic on their ads online and in apps, plus their organic social posts and messages. The result was almost instant boosts in tracking link clicks to in multiple cases millions in a single day.
The obvious but still shocking part:
Those millions of clicks weren’t spread out nice and even across February 9th’s 24 hours.
Rather, most of them were clustered around the 4-6 hours of the actual Super Bowl itself. That’s kind of an infrastructure and DevOps manager’s nightmare.
- Each of those clicks requires measurement.
- Each might be a deeplink, that requires appropriate routing.
- If it’s a deeplink, data needs to be stored server side to provide the right customer experience on app open.
- Whether a deeplink or not, the data for each click needs to be stored, aggregated, costed, and attributed so that each customer gets their ROAS, ROI, MMP install reports, and more.
- If the clicks are on iOS, Singular runs Unified Measurement, ensuring sanity between your app store, ad network, and MMP install numbers
- Often, there’s enrichment … and the list goes on …
Add up all of the compression of activity around the Super Bowl and the extra work around measuring and managing the traffic, and the result is much more than a 10X boost.
Results: massive growth (and not just from the specific Super Bowl ad)
Obviously, we can’t share specific customers’ data: it’s theirs, not ours. We just collect, analyze, and deliver it for them.
But we can say we’ve seen massive leaps in app installs for customers with Super Bowl ads. And it’s not just installs: it’s also app activity: more sessions and higher engagement.
Sometimes, brands can do this without even spending the $8 million it costs to buy a 30-second Super Bowl ad.
Of course, it helps if you do.
One customer paired a Super Bowl ad with a massive social media contest, which was a significant part of the millions of clicks and installs they drove.
But other customers, particularly in the real money gaming space, simply used the excitement of the biggest betting event of the year to significantly grow users, activity, and revenue. That takes a smart campaign which begins months before the Super Bowl, of course, plus smart execution via digital ads, social media, and owned media, including in their own apps.
And it cashes in on massive general excitement and build-up, at much lower cost.
(And risk!)
Big bets can lead to a big halo effect
Clearly, when someone watches a Super Bowl ad they’re not clicking on the ad. (We have had customers use QR codes to surprising success previously, but not this Super Bowl.)
Instead, they’re going online.
They’re paying attention to ads that before they just ignored.
They’re going on advertisers’ websites.
They’re following the advertisers’ socials.
That’s the halo effect, and the reason why we saw a 10X spike in clicks for advertisers who ran ads on good old-fashioned linear TV.
Hopefully for those customers, the halo effect will last a long time, and the users/customers/players they brought onboard during Super Bowl 59 will engage and retain.
Looking for unmatched scalability and reliability?
If you’re looking for a marketing measurement company that can handle insane spikes in activity, talk to us. Singular manages attribution and analytics for some of the largest and busiest brands on the planet, and we’d love to chat with you.
Here are just a few examples:
And hundreds more on our case studies page …
