McDonald’s Offline Promotions Drive Online Traffic
Written by Adam Tornes (contact - e-mail) -- November 30th, 2007 | Recommend ThisMcDonald’s used to be an American institution; like Christmas decorations at Thanksgiving and candy on Halloween. It is now and international phenomenon, serving nearly 54 million customers each day in 120 countries and territories. Many of us have memories of when we were younger, begging our parents to take us to get a Happy Meal. Similarly, I remember begging my parents to take me to McDonald’s so I could collect Monopoly game pieces.
This past October, McDonald’s held its Monopoly game as it does every year and I decided to check if it had any impact on McDonalds.com site traffic. Surprisingly, it did, by a whopping 234.4%. Why is that surprising? Well, it’s because there was little mention of the Monopoly game at McDonalds.com and the online game was hosted on a separate domain, monopoly.corsis.com.
Many of you are probably saying, “So what? People went to McDonalds.com assuming the online game was hosted there. They probably went, discovered the game wasn’t there, and then left.” WRONG! In addition to more unique visitors McDonalds.com received a much greater attention share for the month of October; more than double the domain’s normal attention share, meaning during the month of October, visitors to McDonalds.com spent twice as much time as they typically do.
In addition to the staggering traffic to McDonalds.com in October (2.75 million), monopoly.corsis.com had over 5 million visitors in October. Counting visitors to both sites only once, nearly 5 million more people were exposed to McDonalds’ online properties than in August (before the Monopoly promotion began). Considering that the Monopoly game is mainly focused offline, that is some amazing traffic being driven by an offline promotion. But that’s not all I discovered….
This last graph shows traffic to McDonalds.com prior to this past October. Notice the major spikes in traffic? Every one of those spikes is the result of drastic traffic growth and is associated with an offline promotion.
McDonalds is having great success at driving traffic through its promotions. It’s pretty remarkable considering that all of these promotions were primarily offline and all online aspects were hosted by a third party on a different domain (Promotions.com, now Corsis.com). Based on the data, if I were an online marketer for a brick and mortar company, I’d take a page from McDonalds’ playbook and create some buzz through an offline promotion.
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Get the 
November 30th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Correction, hosted by corsis.com which is now promotions.com which was bought by thestreet.com ;)
November 30th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Interesting tidbit! I had meant the game was hosted by promotions.com previously and was now hosted by corsis.com, not that promotions.com had become corsis.com. I was unaware of the merger between the companies.
http://www.thestreet.com/newsanalysis/technet/10372008.html
November 30th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I don’t find a traffic bump at McDonalds.com surprising at all. Your logic is not sound. Isn’t it equally logical that people would go to the McDonalds.com site first looking for the game and then spend more time on the site, surveying it for the game (thus increasing attention share)?
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Nice data, but not sure if I agree with your conclusions. I think:
The increase in “attention” is more an increase in “frustration” from people spending time trying to find the game on their site.
The fact that they are not taking advantage of the traffic spikes is disheartening. An additional game piece or *something* to reward people for interacting with the brand online and *something* to encourage them to visit a McD’s again …
Sad that after all the obvious signs, they’ve done little to take advantage of a freebie.
Worse that they (or their agancy) has not figured out how to do integrated comms.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Very interesting data
July 31st, 2008 at 6:31 am
I had meant the game was hosted by promotions.com previously and was now hosted by corsis.com, not that promotions.com had become corsis.com. I was unaware of the merger between the companies.