Much to the surprise of everyone except some New York die-hards, an actual football game broke out last Sunday while viewers were trying to watch some very expensive commercials.

Budweiser

By now you’ve seen all the write-ups about which TV spots scored and which ones fumbled. Both Nielsen and USA Today’s Ad Meter anointed Budweiser’s “Rocky” takeoff as the game’s most popular ad among live viewers, while E-Trade’s barfing baby and Pepsi’s Timberlake torture scored highest with TiVo’ers.

But another way to look at the ad contest is to see who did the best job of driving viewers from those pricey $2.7 million 30-second spots to a more engaged relationship with their online sites, either. Marketers had the chance to build on the buzz a Super Bowl ad draws by creating a site or Web page that spoke specifically to their ad content, driving viewers to that Web location through their ad creative, or using search marketing to deliver pay-per-click text ads on the terms game watchers would be most likely to search online.

Reprise Media has been doing post-game analysis on Super Bowl cross-channel marketing for four years, and managing partner Peter Hershberg said yesterday that this year’s report card, compiled with Web analytics company Compete, showed some notable improvement over past performances. For example, this year, 70% of Bowl advertisers bought paid ads against searches on their own brand names. It seems a common-sense thing to do, since some 80% of Internet traffic starts at a search engine. But last year, only 50% of Super Bowl marketers made sure they were findable online in this basic way.

But only 6% of this year’s advertisers included a call to action in their spots that urged people to come find them on the Web—down about 66% from last year’s level. And 93% of them failed to buy search ads against the keyword terms related to aspects of their ads—taglines, slogans, famous spokesperson names, etc.—things that viewers would naturally search on if they remembered the ad but didn’t exactly recall the name of the sponsor.

And with the increasing fragmentation of online audiences, social media are also becoming crucial for turning TV media buys into richer customer relationships. Not quite half of the brands who ran in-game ads Sunday had corporate-owned profiles in MySpace or other social networks, although air time during the Super Bowl was sold out earlier than ever this year, leaving lots of time to set up such pages. The number of companies who highlighted content related to their Super Bowl ads on those profile pages was an amazingly low 14%, Hershberg reported.

Among specific players, Reprise judged that Pepsi had the year’s most valuable ad spot, with good search-ad coverage on a range of keyword terms from “Pepsi” and “Pepsi Stuff” to their spokesman Justin Timberlake. In addition, the company made sure to have branded channels on both YouTube and MySpace. And because the Pepsi Stuff campaign, offering free MP3 downloads with purchase codes, actually launched weeks in advance of the Super Bowl, the Web site had a chance to climb high in the actual organic search results on terms related to the promotion.

Hershberg pointed to GoDaddy, CareerBuilder and Cars.com as other Bowl marketers who took the ball and ran it into the end zone with tightly integrated offline/ online campaigns, including online video, social network pages and thorough search marketing. “This is not surprising, given that all these advertisers are Internet-based and know how to use the Web to drive direct response,” Hershberg says.

Janel Landis is senior director of search strategy and development at SendTec, another search marketing firm that has made an annual tradition of looking closely at the online performance of Super Bowl ads. She shed some light yesterday on the lengths one of these high-achieving Web companies went to in turning game-time attention into online engagement.

As it has done since the 2005 Super Bowl, Internet domain registrar GoDaddy relied heavily on teasing its central spot with an aura of “too hot for TV” and putting the supposedly racy content online only. This year’s commercial featured race driver Danica Patrick and an animal joke that anyone who’s seen the first “Naked Gun” movie with Leslie Nielsen will spot coming down the track. This time around, that tease was the sole content of the commercial aired during the game.

But if GoDaddy has taken a fig leaf from the book of P.T. Barnum, it has also, like a good Web company, learned the importance of leveraging expensive Super Bowl air time to maximum online benefit. For one thing, the URL for the Danica Patrick video ran in big, bold copy during the TV ad and even came up in the dialogue.

Landis says GoDaddy was also careful to place paid-search bids on a list of 500 keywords related to the ad. Some of these were obvious, such as its own brand name. Others were generic and therefore relatively expensive as keywords, such as “Fox Super Bowl commercial” and “download commercials”. (The more general the terms, the more marketers are competing with other bidders for those keywords.)

But some of them were very specific to the GoDaddy spot and even taken from the commercial’s dialogue, including “Danica Patrick Exposure”, “Dougie Dougie commercial” and “beaver”. Terms that specific are bound to cost less per click, and as GoDaddy knows, you just can’t tell what searchers are going to put into that query box to look for you.

In GoDaddy’s case, the strategy paid off handsomely. Of the 2 million hits GoDaddy.com saw last Sunday, more than 9% came through search engines; that’s 22% more traffic from search than the site had seen in the previous two Sundays. Landis reports that the company saw an immediate spike in Web site traffic the minute the commercial aired during the game’s first quarter and experienced half a million visitors in the ensuing 30 minutes—a 2400% increase over traffic during the 2007 Super Bowl.

GoDaddy also earned respect for the strength of its integration of event and action, both in the paid search ads and on its Web site. Landis points out that GoDaddy.com ads served for keywords like “Super Bowl commercial” and “domain” combined Super Bowl-themed headline and ad copy with a strong offer of $6.99 dot-com domains. On the Web site, the Patrick video was followed by a post-roll offer of 10% off a domain order using a special promotional code.

Landis pointed to Doritos as one advertiser who she maintains fumbled seriously in the online hand-off. The snack company had two TV spots during the game: an absurd product-based ad about catching a giant mouse, and a spot that served as the partial prize in Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” contest offering 60 seconds of exposure to an artist that won a popular vote. (Winner Kina Grannis also gets a record-label deal and the chance to get her winning single distributed on iTunes and at www.walmart.com.)

While both those ads featured a Doritos URL at the end, www.snackstrongproductions.com, the address flashed by so quickly and in such small type that Landis says she barely spotted in on high-def television. And looking for the Web address through search or in social networks proved difficult. Landis says searches on “big mouse commercial” produced no paid ads linking to the Doritos site. Nor did searching on the title of Grannis’ song, “Message from Your Heart”.

“If viewers got anything out of that long spot, it was the title of the song,” she says. “Not only was Doritos not bidding on that keyword term, but neither was iTunes, which was where viewers had to go to download the song.” What did come up in searching on the title? Grannis’ MySpace page, which asked visitors to vote for her in the contest that had already ended.