Jobs Site Reports Super Bowl Boost, and It Wasn’t an Advertiser

Jobs.com is thrilled with its post-Super
Bowl site traffic numbers.

The online employment site says it saw a 38 percent boost in visitors to
the site on Monday, with a total of 90,000 people stopping by.

That wouldn’t be surprising, if jobs.com were one of the three sites in its
category that spent millions of dollars for a spot on this year’s Super
Bowl. But it didn’t.

The company is apparently benefiting from consumer confusion, an
easy-to-remember domain name, and a greater awareness of online job
resources in general, after Monster.com, HotJobs.com, and kforce.com ran ads in the big game.

Jobs.com even informally surveyed its visitors and asked which online
employment ad they liked best, and found that 26 percent preferred its
spot. Interestingly, the jobs.com television ad doesn’t start running until
March 6.

“We viewed our competitors’ ads as $10 million of advertising for the
online recruitment category,” says Caryn Kboudi, vice president,
advertising, for jobs.com.

“By waiting until the week before the big event to launch our campaign, we
are able to ride the tide they created by sending job seekers to the net to
do a job search.”

Most of the jobs sites that did advertise in the Super Bowl, though, gained
more traffic that jobs.com did, though, of course, it cost them.

HotJobs.com showed a 240 percent increase in traffic on Sunday and Monday,
and newcomer kforce.com drew in 2,600 percent more, according to Media Metrix. Monster.com, although
it had more unique visitors (414,000) than the other jobs sites during that
time, only saw a 4.5 percent increase, perhaps because its traffic was
already high.