Super Bowl Ads: Winners & Losers

Advertisers spend millions and millions of dollars each year to get in front of Super Bowl viewers. Over time, many have adjusted their campaigns to include calls to action that drive consumers to the Web, to view the ad again, to engage with the brand on social using the campaign's hashtag or simply to visit the brands' websites to learn more.

With smartphones in practically everyone's reach, these advertisers would be wise to ensure their websites are ready for a mobile audience. After all, the chances someone is viewing the Super Bowl with their laptops or desktops nearby are slim, but their mobile devices are likely within 2 feet of where they are sitting - at home, at their friend's house, at a bar, etc. What's more, savvy brands know that consumers who found an advertisement interesting may interact with the brand, advertisement, etc., in the weeks that follow and they expect websites to load quickly. Any delay will, of course, cause a site's bounce rate to increase. 

Knowing this, Dynatrace provided Super Bowl advertisers with tips leading up to the big day and it appears that some listened and some, well, fell flat on their digital face.

Monitoring the situation in real-time, Dynatrace found the following brands to be the losers and winners of Super Bowl XLIX:

Heinz, Cheerios, Beats, Subway and Carmax took the top spots for the fastest-loading sites of all the advertisers (click image to zoom in):

Jaguar, Pepsi and Sonos had the slowest response time of all the advertisers (click image to zoom in):

Dynatrace monitored more sites too, like Katy Perry's during halftime, and discovered the root causes. Read all the findings here.

Aside from page load time, other companies evaluated the winners and losers of the Super Bowl ad campaigns by the number of website visits, social actions and more.

iSpot.tv indicates that Budweiser's Lost Dog commercial was the clear winner, while T-Mobile's Kim Kardashian-West commercial came in second. iSpot.tv even measures sentiment. Budweiser's commercial was liked by 95 percent of viewers, while Kim K got a 40 percent "like" rate - proving people are always on the fence about Mrs. West, but she still brings in the ratings. Even though it had the lowest sentiment of the top-20 commercials, T-Mobile's commercial with Kim K. was viewed more than 20 million times online. 

Finally, all the sentiment and load times aside, Super Bowl advertisers wouldn't have been able to redeem themselves had they forgone a mobile-friendly Web design but seems like they all checked out.  Some sites being accessed from mobile devices, however, had upward of 3, 4 and even 5 second load times (according to the previously mentioned Dynatrace monitoring).

The Super Bowl has come and gone, of course, but the lesson is: Before investing in any marketing campaign that will likely drive traffic to your Web properties, make sure they're ready first.