$5 Million Fumble: Only 3% of Top Super Bowl Advertisers Can Answer a Key Brand Question on Their Website

The average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad this year is a whopping $5 million. That means brands from Audi to TurboTax will shell out nearly $200,000 per second to drive awareness during the big game.

But it works: Everyone talks about the ads before, during, and often long after the game.

But these brands are betting on driving more than discussion: They're banking on your business. Customers see their ad on air, then most likely look them up online, and — if all goes well — buy their product. And with more than 73% of people watching the action with a mobile device in hand, the TV to digital transformation can happen in an instant.

But here's the question no one is really talking about: What happens once they get to the brand's website? We hate to be a Debbie (Touch)Downer, but the brand glow can quickly fade away when these advertisers can't do the basic blocking and tackling.

We did some research and discovered that 29 of 30 top brands running ads during the Super Bowl couldn't directly answer one of the top — and often most basic — questions about their brand with their own website search.

Who wins most creative ad will be highly contested, but what isn't up for debate is which brand scored and which brands fumbled when customers came knocking with a simple question.* Here are the results — and you might be surprised.

The lesson? It's the simple things that really matter. Too many brands can't deliver direct answers on their own website search, and they're losing out on business as a result.

That's because consumers who use site search are actually some of the most valuable customers — the 15% who use site search account for 45% of e-commerce revenue, and site search is 1.8x more effective at producing conversions.

On the flip side, research suggests that most users will abandon a website if they can't find what they're looking for within 15 seconds. That means they could potentially turn to a rival — either by navigating directly to their website, or by turning to a search engine where they'll see information from dozens of brands.

So brands should keep their home field advantage by making sure they can execute the most basic plays — otherwise it really is a $5 million fumble.

Consumers ask questions about your brand every single day. Do you really know who is answering their questions? Learn more in our whitepaper.

*Methodology: We ran brand name searches and measured the results of the "People Also Ask" search results feature within Google, which is used to surface a fixed set of popular related questions to a given query in order to help guide consumers. We selected one of these most popular questions related to each brand and used it to search on that brand's own website. If the search returned a direct answer, the result was a "touchdown." If the search returned an unrelated answer — or if it returned no result at all — it was a "fumble." They had the customer's attention, but lost it.