I know, I know. Kids today are all about the hashtags and the Twitters; but it turns out, we’re pretty good multi-taskers and are still really into searching, too. As has been the case all six years I’ve been looking at how the Super Bowl impacts how we search, we use Google (and Bing and Yahoo) to get more information about everything from snack recipes to players. The more I watch the stats, the more I imagine that everyone is just sitting at home in front of their televisions, laptop at the ready, and every time someone appears on screen, everyone types at once: tell me more about this!
As always, we searched for the commercials (see my in-depth post on Marketing Land for what went right and what could have gotten better), but what else did we search for on game day?
Recipes!
Super Bowl Start Time (of course)
In 2012, I noted that the NFL finally got it right, and set up a page to answer the question that clearly is on everyone’s minds. This trend continued last year (when Google also started providing the answer right at the top of the results). But this year, it was just like 2011 all over again. The NFL site didn’t say anything about the start time of the game and so the page with last year’s start time showed up on the second page of results. Oh, NFL, how you missed out on all those potential visitors, clearly your target audience.
People
You thought I was exaggerating before, but just look at Google Trends. Anytime anyone showed up on TV to wear a big fur coat and toss a coin, or sing a song, or randomly introduce players even though no one has any idea how he’s related to football, we searched.
Skittles!
Fine. Maybe we mostly searched (and bought and ate) Skittles in Seattle.
What matters is that I was able to enjoy a refreshing Skittles-based cocktail while watching the NFC championship game before our entire city ran out.
(Go hawks!)
Related:
- Super Bowl 2009: Start times and other searches
- Super Bowl 2010: Still looking for when it starts
- Super Bowl 2011: The search for start time continues
- Super Bowl 2012: The NFL gets it right and tells us when the game starts
- Super Bowl 2013: How are we searching?
- Super Bowl 2013: What we searched for during the game
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